Water from the North

WATER FROM THE NORTH

NATURE, FRESHWATER, AND THE NORTH AMERICAN WATER AND POWER ALLIANCE

Andrew W. Reeves

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Master of Arts

Graduate Department of Geography

University o f Toronto

WATER FROM THE NORTH: NATURE, FRESHWATER, AND THE

NORTH AMERICAN WATER AND POWER ALLIANCE

Master of Arts

Andrew W. Reeves, 2009

Department of Geography

University of Toronto

Thesis Abstract

The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a high modernist continental water diversion project drafted in Los Angeles in 1964, is examined for the impact it had upon social conceptions of nature, the scale of water diversion in North America, and the extent of American Southwestern efforts at sustaining unsustainable Northern lifestyles. Drafted to address the anxiety of perceived ecoscarcity regarding water shortages in the early 1960s, NAWAPA emerged after a century of increasingly large‐scale diversion projects, and seemed a logical continuation of such grandiose, “jet‐ age” type thinking. It proposed to re‐engineer the North American landscape to provide water from the North to the arid Southwest. Reasons for the plans failure (including the monumental shift in scale, and Canadian territorial and environmental opposition) are examined in relation to how nature was conceived – or forgotten – in the proposal.

Keywords: freshwater; nature; resources; North America; high modernism; the “West.”

ii Thesis Contents

Thesis Abstract – pg. ii

Thesis Contents – pg. iii

List of Tables and Figures (Organized by Chapter) – pg. iv

List of Abbreviations – pg. v

Introduction pg. 1

Chapter One Theorizing NAWAPA – pg. 16

Section 1.1 ‐ Nature, ‘nature,’ nature(s) – pg. 17 Section 1.2 ‐ Motivations Behind Domination – pg. 21 Section 1.3 ‐ Capitalist Nature and Value – pg. 26 Section 1.4 ‐ Science and Technology in the Transformation of Nature – pg. 31

Chapter Two Water in the American and Canadian Wests – pg. 36

Section 2.1 ‐ Frontier Thesis and Metropolitanism – pg. 38 Section 2.2 ‐ Early Water Development: Riparianism and Prior Appropriation – pg. 42 Section 2.3 ‐ Water as Resource in the American West – pg. 46 Section 2.4 ‐ Humans as Managers of Nature – pg. 49 Section 2.5 ‐ Failure and Rebirth: Elwood Mead, the Bureau, and the East/West divide – pg. 51 Section 2.6 ‐ Setting the Stage for NAWAPA: The Columbia River Treaty – pg. 56

Chapter Three The State and Social Conceptions of Nature – pg. 63

Section 3.1 ‐ Problems with Unchecked Development, Growth, and Northern Lifestyles – pg. 65 Section 3.2 ‐ High Modernism and the Conservation Movement – pg. 72 Section 3.3 ‐ Canadian High Modernism – Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision – pg. 77 Section 3.4 ‐ NAWAPA and the Socio‐cultural Conceptualization of ‘nature’ – pg. 81

Chapter Four NAWAPA: A Grandiose and Failed Proposal – pg. 90

Section 4.1 ‐ Parsons’ NAWAPA Plan – pg. 92 Section 4.2 ‐ Science and Technology in the Rise and Fall of NAWAPA – pg. 95 Section 4.3 ‐ Implications of NAWAPA for the Canadian nation‐state – pg. 101 Section 4.4 ‐ W ater as Resource II: The Context of Canadian Export – pg. 111

Conclusion – pg. 119

Bibliography – pg. 129

iii List of Tables and Figures (Organized by Chapter)

Table 4.1 – NAWAPA: Benefits by Country – pg. 111

Figure 2.1 – River Discharge in Canada – pg. 52

Figure 2.2 – Columbia River Plan – pg. 57

Figure 3.1 – Breakdown of 1960 Water Withdrawal in the United States – pg. 71

Figure 3.2 – Total U.S. Withdrawal by State ‐ Irrigation ‐ 2000 – pg. 72

Figure 4.1 – North American Water and Power Alliance – pg. 94

iv List of Abbreviations

CeNAWP – Central North American Water and Power Alliance

CWRA – Canadian Water Resources Association

EMR – Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Resources

GRAND Canal – Great Replenishment and Northern Lakes Development Canal

IJC – International Joint Commission

MP – Member of Parliament

MTS – Ministry of Mines and Technical Surveys

NAFTA – North American Free Trade Agreement

NANR – Ministry of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources

NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NAWAPA – North American Water and Power Alliance

NWC – National Water Commission (United States)

POWI – Program on Water Issues, Munk Centre at the University of Toronto

UBC – University of British Columbia

USGS – United States Geological Survey

USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

WWD – United States Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development

v - 1 -

Introduction

"Don't spoil the party, but here's the truth: We have squandered our planet's resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn't going to be one. So there goes the Junior Prom, but that's not the half of it." – Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

In September 1964, the Ralph M. Parsons Company, an engineering and planning firm from Los Angeles, published a pamphlet entitled “North American Water and Power Alliance” (NAWAPA). It was a proposal for the largest continental engineering project ever envisioned in North America. In response to a perceived shortage of freshwater in the American Southwest, the plan called for 100,000,000 kilowatts of power to be produced annually that would have generated over four billion dollars each year from the sale of hydropower. It would have cost one hundred billion dollars to complete based on 1964 pricing, rising to over two hundred billion by estimates from the early 1970s. The projected timeline was an estimated thirty years to secure the 250 million acre‐feet of irrigation water that would be divided (based on perceived shortages) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. NAWAPA also called for all major river systems across the Canadian and American West to be canalled with the ultimate goal of generating shipping revenue from a trans‐Canada canal linking Lake Superior with the Pacific Ocean. Yet the most contentious aspect of the proposal was the construction of a 500 mile long storage dam in the Rocky Mountain Trench in British Columbia that would flood vast stretches of the mountainous B.C. interior. 1 For a plan of such magnitude to receive political, scientific, and scholarly attention indicates the extent of American perceptions of water scarcity by the 1960s. NAWAPA surfaced after a half‐century of increasingly grandiose water engineering plans formalized by the Bureau of Reclamation or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was portrayed as the next logical step in water development in America, designed to increase the magnitude of water projects while making them more inclusive of water originating outside the political boundary of the United States.

1 Ralph M. Parsons Co. NAWAPA: North American Water and Power Alliance. Brochure No. 606‐ 2934‐19. Los Angeles, 1964. - 2 -

Water originating in Canadian territory was conveniently relabelled “continental water” by those in the United States concerned with water’s over‐ consumption in the Southwest, and they set their minds to acquiring it. There was no alternative to Canadian participation in the plan: with such sizable portions of the necessary water emanating from within Canadian political boundaries, Canada became the irreplaceable cornerstone to the Alliance.2 It also generated intense debate as to the future of freshwater resources in Canada that spawned larger questions of the nation’s development. “Water is so important in life,” argued B.C. MP H.W. Herridge in 1964, “that its conservation and distribution must override the geographical boundaries of private property…[and] the political boundaries of federal and provincial jurisdictions.”3 Herridge was wise to omit the importance of water’s distribution flowing seamlessly across national borders given the demand for Canadian water south of the 49th parallel. Responses to the plan were extremely varied. In The Coming Water Famine, Democratic Congressman Jim Wright of Texas argued in 1966 that “the orderly transportation of water on a growing scale from areas where its overabundance is both a waste and a curse, to areas where it is desperately needed” was the “obvious” and “logical” next step in North American water development.4 NAWAPA’s failure to be dismissed as lunacy implied to James Laxer not only the American thirst for cheap water but the “imperial grandeur” of the scheme itself, which accounted for the “terrifying seriousness” with which the proposal was considered.5 Yet as quickly as the plan appeared in the public consciousness after 1964, by 1973 NAWAPA would be all but forgotten as a serious solution to any real or imagined water “crisis” in North America. The decade in which large‐scale water diversion seemed the logical solution to North America’s water scarcity and pollution problems ended with water being replaced by oil as the resource whose safeguarding was deemed

2 Marc Reisner. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Viking Press , 1986, 14. 3 Herbert W. Herridge. “Criminal Code.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 26th Parliament. 2nd Session. Vol. X (December 11, 1964). Ottawa, 1964, 11066. 4 Jim Wright. The Coming Water Famine, Coward‐McCann Inc., 1963, 217. 5 James Laxer. The Energy Poker Game: The Politics of the Continental Resource Deal, New Press, 1970, 36. - 3 -

necessary to both future development and national security. Critically, NAWAPA came to be seen in retrospect as “a bridge too far” in the commodification and re‐ engineering of nature in the 1960s, despite the preceding century and a half of large‐scale capitalist interventions. Somehow, after irrigation and damming projects had grown in size and scope over the course of the twentieth century, the Alliance was simply more than many North Americans were willing to accept. NAWAPA did find sporadic and often disjointed praise in North America: the Alliance was unsurprisingly welcomed in the United States moreso than in Canada, and nowhere more than in the arid Southwest. Champions of NAWAPA such as Democratic Senator Frank E. Moss from Utah identified not only the benefits to be accrued by Canada in resource and energy extraction, export, and increased study of its water resources, but implied that continental thinking about resources in North America was the primary method for ensuring future Canadian and American co‐ operation. “Americans and Canadians want to live in constructive peace on this continent for many centuries to come” Moss argued, and “they can’t do it unless they take care of the unparalleled natural endowments of North America.”6 Others demonstrated their skepticism of the plan’s feasibility. Some commentators insisted that without further study of Canadian water resources and future needs for industry, agriculture, and municipal consumption, NAWAPA should not proceed. Canadian commentators from federal and provincial governments, academia, the media, and the general public argued against NAWAPA from a wide array of perspectives. They argued against the plan’s economic feasibility, the necessary weakening of Canadian sovereignty over Canadian resources, and attempted to overturn the myth of freshwater’s superabundance in Canada upon which the Alliance rested. Many wondered aloud about the unknown climactic effects of transferring large volumes of cold water into arid southern regions.7 However, many Canadian commentators in favour of water export to the United States, even if not in favour of NAWAPA specifically, felt that some form of the plan should not be

6 Frank E. Moss. The Water Crisis. Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1967, 252. 7 Alberta. Department of Agriculture. Water Resources Division. Water Diversion proposals of North America. Canadian Council of Resource Ministers, 1968, 9. - 4 -

discarded altogether. Inter‐basin diversions had a long and established history in Canada before 1964, but the prospect of international diversions required “a comprehensive assessment of regional water problems and opportunities” before the implementation of any transboundary schemes.8 Even Sen. Moss, Chairman of the U.S. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development (WWD) was forced to conclude in 1966 that until a study of the financial feasibility of the plan was conducted, “it is not possible to say that this NAWAPA concept of water supply should be either undertaken or abandoned.”9 The precedent to be set for all resource exports by the creation of a continental market caused many in Canada to cringe at the thought of increased linkages to the United States. There was also the necessary environmental destruction entailed in addition to the trading of questionable future prosperity for short‐term monetary gains and the displacement of Native and non‐Native communities in northern British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. Trevor Lloyd, a geographer at McGill University, spoke for many in government and academia when he claimed that NAWAPA was an example of “sophomore civil engineering.”10 Lloyd also claimed to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966 that the International Joint Commission (IJC), an international organization founded in 1909 to oversee transboundary water disputes between Canada and the United States, might not be the most appropriate framework to discuss Canadian water export given that “Canada has not always been sufficiently skillful to maintain its authority in the partnership.”11 General Andrew McNaughton spoke to Canadians outside of

8 See Frank J. Quinn. Ministry of the Environment. Inland Waters Directorate. Water Planning and Management Branch. AreaofOrigin Protectionism in Western Waters. Queen’s Printer, 1973, 70; also see W.R.D. Sewell, ‘Inter‐basin Water Diversions: Canadian Experiences and Perspectives’ in Golubev, Genady N. and Asit K. Biswas, eds. Large Scale Water Transfers: Emerging Environmental and Social Experiences. United Nations Environmental Programme. Tycolly Publishing, 1985, 7. 9 United States Senate. Committee on Public Works. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development. A Summary of Water Resource Projects, Plans, and Studies Relating to the Western and Midwestern United States. Government Printing Office, 1966, 56. 10 Trevor Lloyd, ‘A Water Resource Policy for Canada’ in Nelson, J.G. and M.J. Chambers, eds. Water: Process and Method in Canadian Geography. Methuen, 1969, 290. 11 Trevor Lloyd, quoted in Toronto Globe and Mail. Scheme to Divert Canadian Water Assailed. February 25, 1966. - 5 -

government and academia skeptical of water export when he infamously labelled NAWAPA “a monstrous concept, a diabolic thesis.”12 It was impossible to be neutral about the North American Water and Power Alliance, yet its scale created many uncertainties. Whatever one thought about water and nature’s role in Canadian history or Canada’s increasing dependence upon trade with the United States in the 1960s, NAWAPA was either the most logical and lucrative proposition to ease Western American water woes, or was the ultimate sellout of Canadian resources to the United States. The unique positioning of water in Canada’s heritage has embedded itself deeply into the Canadian psyche, and while some maintain that “water is our heritage and you don’t sell your heritage,” others are confused by the adamant refusal of many Canadians to consider water export.13 University of Toronto economist Abraham Rotstein questioned the special relationship between Canadians and water in 1978, arguing that it is “as ‘self‐evident’ to Canadians at large, as it is puzzling to everyone else.”14 The work of Andrew Biro, political scientist at Acadia University, is useful in understanding the ways in which water has figured prominently in the Canadian national psyche. My work regarding water and the Canadian consciousness fits well within the framework Biro has created in understanding the importance of preserving wilderness in maintaining a truly Canadian landscape that enhances the sovereignty of the Canadian state.15 W.R.D. Sewell, geographer at the University of Victoria, echoed Rotstein’s sentiment in claiming that “an adamant policy of non‐export of water does not seem particularly rational when the available resources are so vast.”16 Or seemingly so vast: in 1964, the Canadian government’s knowledge of its freshwater reserves was

12 Gen. A.G.L. McNaughton in Royal Society of Canada. Dolman, Claude E., ed. Water Resources of Canada. Symposia Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966. University of Toronto Press, 1967, 16. 13 W.A.C. Bennett, quoted in Abraham Rotstein, ‘Canada: The New Nationalism’ in Foreign Affairs; October 1976, 112. 14 Rotstein, ‘The New Nationalism’ (note 13), 112. 15 For an in‐depth discussion of this idea, see Andrew Biro, ‘Half‐Empty of Half‐Full? Water Politics and the Canadian National Imaginary’ in Bakker, Karen, ed. Eau Canada: The Future of Canada’s Water. UBC Press, 2007, pp. 321‐334. 16 W.R.D. Sewell, ‘Pipedream or Practical Possibility?’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; 1967. Vol. 23, 11. - 6 -

relatively modest. This position left successive government ministers with little hard data with which to oppose American requests for feasibility studies of water projects. Speaking to the House of Commons in June 1966, Jean‐Luc Pépin, the Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys (MTS), noted that “we do not know whether we have something to sell. We do not know how much water we have and we do not know how much water we need. We only know that we are not willing to sell before we have a good idea what our needs are.”17 To MP Ron Basford, Canadian uncertainty indicated the extreme prematurity of the export or exchange question with the United States.18 Frank Moss wondered aloud how Canadians could begin contemplating water export without first taking stock of its availability, a question that subsequent generations of Canadians have had to grapple with. The “debate about water transfers in North America…has never ceased,” notes Sewell, giving Canadians and Americans an opportunity to inventory not only freshwater as a resource, but the significant social values humanity attributes to water.19 This thesis may be interpreted as a study of failure, and the competing notions of what constitutes failure, any lessons to be taken from the plan never materializing, and the influences upon its failure that come to light in retrospect. Understandings of NAWAPA’s potentially catastrophic consequences must be tempered by the knowledge that the plan was never approved, but to assume that NAWAPA has simply been relegated to the dustbin of history is too narrow. My thesis sets out to accomplish a more comprehensive understanding of how the Alliance emerged in order to argue that it changed the very nature of the water diversion and export debate in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. To achieve this, I examine human domination and intervention into nature, the impact of high modernist thought and technological advancement on state planning, competing understandings of nature and natural value, and the details of the Alliance itself.

17 Hon. Jean‐Luc Pépin, “Water Resources – Sale of Canadian Water.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 27th Parliament, 1st Session. Vol. VII (June 28, 1966). Ottawa, 1966, 6997. 18 Ron Basford, “Water Resources – Sale of Canadian Water.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 27th Parliament, 1st Session. Vol. VII (June 28, 1966). Ottawa, 1966, 6996. 19 Harold D. Foster, and W.R.D. Sewell. Water: The Emerging Crisis in Canada. James Lorimer & Company, 1981, 42. - 7 -

Yet we cannot ignore – as was so often done – the very real physical aspects of NAWAPA that would have altered the natural landscape of North America beyond comprehension. One of my central claims is that nature as an arena in which the Alliance would have existed was never actively considered by proponents of the plan, and seldom utilized fully as a tool of resistance by those in opposition. Despite the relative lack of consideration for nature as a modernist canvas, the Alliance came to defy easy comprehension in the commodification of a nature that had previously been rationalized into subservience. To this end, I have incorporated arguments on the ideals of the Enlightenment, thinking from the Frankfurt School, and the impact of capitalist expansion on the transformation of natural attributes into natural resources. Re‐inserting nature into the debate not only over NAWAPA, but also as an active participant in Canadian perceptions of natural heritage is a central objective of this thesis. Considering the iconic status of water in the Canadian imagination, I argue in Chapter Four that proposals like NAWAPA which threaten the security of nature’s integrity in Canada help inform the manner of representation nature is granted in the Canadian psyche. In other words, the ideas that threaten also provide valuable opportunities for reflection and consolidation of disparate views, in this case on the place of water in Canadian understandings of the natural world. Writers from the nationalist left in Canada in the 1960s are put to use here as reactions to the placement of nature and natural resources at the forefront of American dreams for continental expansionism in the 1960s and 1970s. A leading cause of this expansionism across North America was a rush to address the growing anxiety generated by perceived ecoscarcity. In this sense, NAWAPA was merely a means to an end, though a disagreement over both the means and the ends ensured that the Alliance would never be fully dismissed, but also that the real issue – preserving unsustainable lifestyles in the arid Southwest of the United States at the expense of the natural world – would never be adequately addressed. An opportunity was - 8 -

squandered with NAWAPA’s passing to re‐evaluate the “prestige of waste and consumption” so prevalent in North America.20 It is important to examine NAWAPA as both a grandiose and failed proposal for the insights it provides into North American thinking about nature, freshwater, and the ways in which they are impacted upon or dictated by advancements in science and technology designed to prolong unsustainable growth in the American Southwest. Paramount to this dual conception of NAWAPA is a re‐insertion of nature into the debate over the Alliance’s benefits and drawbacks, and to do so requires a careful consideration of what understanding of “nature” is being used when the term is frequented, and by whom. I situate my understanding of external nature within Neil Smith’s conceptions outlined in Uneven Development, which is examined in relation to its contrasts with first and second nature as conceived by William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis. The broad frameworks generated by Smith and Cronon are valuable for analyzing the subtle differences between the physical environment and the social dynamic of nature, while realizing that “human beings and their social behaviours are every bit as natural as the so‐called external aspects of nature.”21 Eric Swyngedouw’s water/money/power nexus is a useful context within which to situate my discussion of NAWAPA as a plan intent on the increased urbanization of the Southwest. NAWAPA emerged at a moment when environmental and ecological thinking were in their infancy, and the proposal helped many in these movements find their voice in opposition to the Alliance. Yet as a critical watershed moment in North American environmental history, one of the central arguments of this work is to argue that NAWAPA signaled one terminus of James Scott’s understanding of high modernist state planning within a continental framework. I also maintain that the Alliance helped usher in a new era of environmental and national consciousness that sought the ecological and geopolitical preservation of

20 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1991, 31. 21 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. University of Georgia Press, 1984, 11‐12. - 9 -

Canada.22 I use the Alliance to examine the broader problems of growth and development and of Canadian national sentiment towards freshwater, to highlight the “structures of feeling” that provide a framework for examining human interventions into the natural world.23 Crucially, while NAWAPA is an example of Scott’s notion of high modernist state planning, it is distinctive in that the plan was never realized at a moment in history when large‐scale, high modernist projects were fashionable. With the ultimate goal of improving human welfare, NAWAPA’s proponents sought to radically alter the landscape in potentially catastrophic ways. That they did not succeed, and that it remains a rare example of high modernist planning rejected by the people of North America, indicates that NAWAPA is deserving of further study. Yet as a case study of high modernism in North America, NAWAPA may be limited in this sense because the plan did not come to fruition. The question to be asked, therefore, is why choose to examine a failed engineering plan to examine how the United States, as a high modernist state, re‐conceptualised the North American landscape. Also worth asking is how NAWAPA ended the drive of high modernist planning with regards to water projects in the American Southwest, and scrutinize the role that Canada played in this conclusion. This work makes extensive use of a broad selection of primary documents. Hansard debates from the Canadian House of Commons reveal the extent to which freshwater resources were a critical concern of successive Canadian governments from Diefenbaker to Trudeau’s administration. From 1964 to 1973 and the beginning of the OPEC oil crisis, freshwater management and concern for water export to the United States dominated discussion inside and out of the House of Commons in statements and debates from the Ministers of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources (NANR), Energy, Mines, and Resources (EMR), and the Environment. Conversely, the relative absence of freshwater issues from public

22 At least until the issues of environmental protection and national preservation collided head on in the 1988 Canadian federal election in which the issue of free trade figured prominently. 23 For the structure of this argument, see Andrew Biro, ‘Wet Dreams: Ideology and the Debate over Canadian Water Exports.’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; December, 2002. Vol. 13, No. 4, 30; for the quote, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977, 121. - 10 -

debate after 1973 indicates the shifting emphasis away from freshwater as the prime resource of future economic growth towards concern over a stable supply of oil. Foster and Sewell note that “by the end of the 1960s water export was no longer an issue discussed by federal or provincial politicians or by the press.”24 But water, like oil, never fully left the public debate. It re‐emerged throughout subsequent decades in the California droughts of 1977‐78, the 1988 Canada‐U.S. Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA, in addition to the increase in cross‐ border legislation regarding water diversion, consumption, and pollution in the Great Lakes watershed. Government reports and inquiries from the Canadian federal government such as the 1973 AreaofOrigin Protectionism in Western Waters, and provincial reports such as the 1968 Water Diversion Proposals of North America, prepared by the Alberta Department of the Environment, highlight critical thinking from both government and academia within Canada and the United States on key water resource issues. Other reports from the provinces of Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia do the same.25 Press releases and speeches from NANR and EMR ministers throughout the 1960s and 1970s to various interest groups (from trade and commerce organizations to construction unions) highlight the public voices of Jean‐Luc Pépin, EMR’s Minister, his Deputy Minister Jack Davis, and NANR ministers Arthur Laing and J.J. Greene in the Pearson and Trudeau administrations. South of the border, the final report of the U.S. Senate Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development, convened in 1966 and chaired by Sen. Frank Moss, provides valuable insight into American thinking about NAWAPA specifically, and the frenzied atmosphere of water scarcity in the American West more broadly. Canada’s Resources for Tomorrow conference, convened in Montreal in 1962 by Alvin Hamilton, Diefenbaker’s Minister of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, was the first such meeting of academics, engineers, and politicians in half a century in Canada to acquire a better understanding of Canada’s natural resources.

24 Foster and Sewell, Water: The Emerging Crisis in Canada (note 19), 42. 25 See Ontario Water Resources Association. June 12‐14, 1984. Future’s in Water: Proceedings of the Ontario Water Resources Association Conference. Toronto, Ontario; Canadian Water Resources Association. June, 1973. 25th Anniversary Conference. Winnipeg, Manitoba; and University of British Columbia. April, 1966. Community and Regional Planning Studies. Student Project 6. NAWAPA: An Impetus to Regional Development in British Columbia. Vancouver, B.C. - 11 -

Within the context of increased research being undertaken in the Arctic as part of Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision, the seminars and public debates of the Resources for Tomorrow conference sparked a flurry of interest in Canada’s natural resources that coincided with the signing of the Columbia River Treaty and the Alliance proposal. At the Royal Society of Canada Symposium on Water Resources in 1965, for example, the debate between Sen. Frank Moss and former IJC chair and distinguished Canadian Gen. Andrew McNaughton became legendary, as McNaughton, a titan of Canadian water diplomacy and former soldier and diplomat, squared off against the loudest proponent of the largest water‐engineering scheme to date. Conference proceedings emanating from within academia such as the Arid Lands in Perspective conference convened in 1969 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, provide technical insight into the nature of resource use and water management, and emanating from within government such as the 1984 Ontario Water Resources Association conference. NAWAPA often emerged at conferences well into the 1980s, either as a model for emulation, or an example of water management taken too far. Chapter One introduces the theoretical arguments pertinent to understanding the Alliance and the ways in which its proponents re‐imagined the natural world both as a social construction and as a physical environment modified through human interventions. Drawing upon the work of Noel Castree and Kate Soper, I replace the idea of a universal nature with a more flexible notion in which competing models are seen as complementary, rather than adversarial. I analyze the motivations behind human domination of the natural world in relation to high modernism and the state’s efforts at nation‐building and improving human welfare. As such, domination is treated as a “safer” route to overcoming ecological scarcity than challenges to the tradition of development and growth in the United States. The works of Neil Smith and David Harvey have been utilized in examining Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School in his discussion of Enlightenment ideals in relation to capitalist conceptions of nature. They raise the issue of competing conceptions of value in and of the environment, problematizing the use of monetary systems of valuation in appreciating natural resources. Smith and Harvey also - 12 - indicate the increasing importance of science and technology in the achievement of state objectives at the beginning of the twentieth century. Chapter Two provides an historical overview of the evolution of water management and growth in the American and Canadian Wests from the nineteenth century to the Alliance proposal in 1964. Drawing on the work of historians Frederick Jackson Turner in America and Donald Creighton in Canada to contrast the frontier thesis with the theory of metropolitanism, this chapter examines differing approaches to Western growth and the obsession with development to understand why notions of “the West” differed so greatly between countries. I also use the work of Donald Worster to explore the choice of prior appropriation over riparian rights, and why the more competitive method for dividing natural resources into property was chosen in the American West. The association between capital accumulation in the commodification of water and a belief in the infallibility of science and technology to overcome ecological scarcity is analyzed in relation to NAWAPA. The work of William Leiss is used to understand how the Alliance attempted to dominate nature through a regulation of human behaviour. Finally, Chapter Two will examine the Columbia River Treaty as a precursor to the kind and degree of water diversions taking place between Canada and the United States before 1964. The aim of this chapter is to situate NAWAPA within the continuum of water development projects to examine why the Alliance was understood as a logical continuation of Western water policy. Chapter Three examines the role of the state in shaping how nature is conceived and modified through specific case studies and broadly based theoretical works. Drawing upon David Harvey’s work, this chapter examines problems of unchecked development and growth in relation to the Alliance, stressing the impossibility of continuous population and industrial growth in areas of the United Sates without access to sufficient water resources. It will explore why massive socio‐natural re‐engineering schemes were made to seem logical in addition to analyzing the untouchable role of development in American society. Section 3.1 will briefly analyze statistical data from the United States Geological Survey in 1960 and 2000 to examine the accuracy of freshwater projections to understand the extent of - 13 -

the freshwater crisis. James Scott’s theory of high modernism is re‐examined in relation to the conservation movement of the early twentieth century to make the connection between the two with regards to scientific rationalization. The promotion of rational use over reduced consumption is of particular interest. I will then examine Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s 1957 “Northern Vision” as an example of high modernist planning in Canada to address the ways in which it facilitated NAWAPA’s proposal seven years later. Finally, this chapter analyzes the ways in which social conceptions of nature reflect the dominant ideologies and identities of the society and era they mirror, and what social understandings of the nature and the environment that NAWAPA reproduces for contemporary readers. Chapter Four examines the Alliance in greater depth, outlining key details of the plan that highlight the magnitude of its financial, political, and environmental burdens. It examines the role of science and technology in NAWAPA’s rapid rise and descent, and the correlation between dominating nature with control of human populations. Notions of nature’s flexibility and the idea of ecoscarcity are also discussed in relation to technological advancements. This chapter explores how the Alliance was perceived as a threat to Canadian sovereignty, as a conduit to increased cross‐border linkages, and as an indicator of Canada’s relative ignorance towards its natural resources. Lastly, Chapter Four explores the context of Canadian resource export in the 1960s and early 1970s to parallel water with the export of other non‐ renewable resources such as oil and natural gas. I will conclude by examining why water resources were understood differently from other natural resources in the Canadian imagination, and the ways in which this outlook shaped the NAWAPA debate and assisted in its failure. What follows is an effort at situating NAWAPA within the larger frameworks of political ecology and historical geography to examine North American endeavors at intervening in the natural world. This includes the historical contexts, theories, ecological debates, and capitalist underpinnings that characterized high modernist efforts at socio‐natural engineering in the twentieth century. The extent to which each society was prepared to continue placing human welfare above environmental protection regardless of “need” or consequences underpinned the NAWAPA debate - 14 -

in Canada and the United States. My discussion of the extent of the water “crisis” in the Southwest in the 1960s is situated within David Harvey’s critique of the Western conception of ecoscarcity in which notions of sustainability are made subservient to growth, development, and middle‐class lifestyles. Competing notions of natural value are examined, informed as much by Arne Naess’s conceptions of “shallow and deep ecology” as it is by Andrew Dobson’s “green theory of value” and the ways they intertwine.26 Inasmuch as the NAWAPA debate was nominally about freshwater resources, this was merely the public dimension of a debate that at root was debating the means through which Western progress had so far been achieved, and more importantly how this progress would be guaranteed in the future. Yet the 1960s saw the rise of public participation, what Sewell called “a new religion” in Canada. He argued that “it drew support from those who were disenchanted with the growing alienation of the individual in public policy making on the one hand, and from those who were concerned with the environmental effects of resource development on the other.”27 This spirit of protest and public involvement influenced how NAWAPA was understood by Canadian society and why it was ultimately rejected. The origins of the environmental movement, coupled with the “new religion” of public participation in Canada in the 1960s, ensured that any effort at environmental degradation in the name of resource development would be met with increased public awareness and outcry. And by the end of the 1970s, public participation as a means of gauging social support and airing concerns was widely adopted in the realm of water management.28 This method was also used with great success by Justice Thomas Berger in his 1976 inquiry of the environmental and demographic impacts of the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline. The pipeline, as with NAWAPA, would have had catastrophic impacts upon the environment and certain populations of Northern Canada and Alaska; as such, those who opposed

26 See Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle (note 20); and Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought. Routledge, 2000. 27 W.R.D. Sewell, in National Resource Conference. Sadler, Barry, ed. Water Policy for Western Canada: The Issue of the Eighties. University of Calgary Press, 1982, 77. 28 Sewell, Water Policy for Western Canada (note 27), 77‐78. - 15 -

NAWAPA depended heavily upon public concern expressed through the media and their local government representatives. Yet in the background, amongst discussions of acre‐feet, consumption patterns, and mechanized irrigation, was the natural world, central to such high modernist plans though conspicuously absent from discussions on continental water diversion. NAWAPA will serve as the common thread that winds though the often disparate themes of this work, tying together the various ways in which nature, freshwater, society and culture, capitalism and value‐ theory, and science and technology have and will continue to shape efforts at understanding how a proposal to radically alter the natural foundations of North America entered the public spotlight.

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Chapter One – Theorizing NAWAPA

“As we look towards the end of the twentieth century…we see…this diversity [of the natural world] threatened by dominant societies pursuing goa ls that, though they have produced a rich material culture, are already eroding the sources of their original stimulus.” – Dr. Ian Mctaggert‐Cowan

Study of the North American Water and Power Alliance is valuable for understanding the broader social changes taking place in Canada in the 1960s. Public, government, and academic responses to NAWAPA will stand as examples of the ways in which Canadians attempted to address many challenging issues that coalesced in the 1960s, including questions of nature and the role of natural resources in society; a changing environment and environmental ethos; Canada’s continued dependence on resource exports and the growing threat of foreign ownership; jurisdictional struggles between the federal government and the provinces; the nature of Canadian sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of American interests; and the sustainability of Western lifestyles. Many of these issues came together at the federal level during the Resources for Tomorrow Conference, held in Montreal in 1961. Organized by the Diefenbaker government, the conference provided not only a framework for federal‐provincial cooperation regarding natural resources and national development, but also “marked the beginning of a new concern for the environment in Canada.”1 The discourse that emerged on natural resources as a result of the conference was useful in providing many Canadians with an opportunity to help determine what manner of country Canada would become. Within a broader social context, NAWAPA sits astride the division between a more traditional concept of nature with deep roots in Enlightenment thought, and an increasingly environmental and social conception of nature that maintains anthropocentric notions of human agency as central to natural processes, while understanding that human needs are only one part of the equation. In this sense, NAWAPA is examined as an intriguing example of more traditional thinking on nature halted by changing environmental, social, and political priorities. This chapter will situate NAWAPA within theoretical arguments that will assist in making

1 Patrick Kyba, Alvin: A Biography of the Honourable Alvin Hamilton, P.C. Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, 1989, 140. - 17 -

clearer issues of critical importance to understanding NAWAPA. My wider aim is to examine how these issues impacted upon and were influenced by the social ambitions of Canadians in the 1960s. 1.1 – Nature, “nature,” nature(s) My work falls within the broadly defined fields of political ecology and historical geography. In situating the North American Water and Power Alliance as a state‐sponsored effort at the continental domination of nature through socio‐ engineering, it may be seen as an effort at the former, while its historical emphasis on the evolution and importance of water development in the American and Canadian Wests upon the future of freshwater as a resource in North America situates this paper firmly within the latter field. Of critical importance to both fields is an understanding of “nature,” a term that defies easy comprehension. Underpinning the entire NAWAPA debate, though seldom brought to the forefront, “nature” – as a concept – or “nature” – as a physically constituted space – was ultimately the (seldom active) subject of discussion, whether or not the various framers of the NAWAPA debate chose to see nature as that which they were intending to alter. Its omission speaks to the degree which humanity is already prone to considering nature, if at all, largely as a pool of available resources awaiting human extraction or use. Water is only one part of that natural world: as the scope of water development projects began encroaching upon nature in increasingly violent ways, it is surprising the NAWAPA debate did not consider nature in the same way that financial, political, and occasionally social matters were discussed. Throughout the debate, nature maintained a relatively benign presence, allowing Western society to alter the natural landscape as it saw fit. Nature as the arena in which the NAWAPA proposal was situated never emerged. The ultimate demarcation of the land by NAWAPA’s framers was one based solely on political divisions. While the scope of this section will not allow for an intricate reading of the multiple competing definitions of nature, a basic knowledge of William Cronon’s notion of first and second nature and external nature as theorized by Neil Smith will - 18 -

suffice for my purposes.2 For Cronon, first nature exists as those elements of the natural world that operate without direct impact or intervention by humanity: those elements entered the realm of second nature once the influence of humanity became apparent. A river flowing to a larger body of water may be part of first nature until it is canalled and dammed (or otherwise impaired) to suit the needs of human beings. While the distinctions between first and second nature became increasingly blurred for Cronon, there is nevertheless a moment when the impact of humanity becomes so great that an aspect of the natural world can no longer be understood independent of humanity’s influence. Conversely, Smith rejects this traditional division of nature to argue in Uneven Development that the premise of first nature, however marginal, no longer exists. External nature, for Smith, was so intrinsically produced by capitalism and bound to its needs that there was no natural realm untouched by the vagaries of capital to speak of.3 For Smith, universal nature reflected the exchange values accredited to natural attributes rendered through the process of commodification. Noel Castree assists Smith’s understanding by defining external nature as “that which is inherently non‐social and nonhuman,” and universal nature as “a way of seeing natural characteristics as… something encompassing of everything there is – humans included insofar as they too, being biological entities, are part of a…global, ecological system.”4 For the purposes of this paper, it is this hybridized understanding of external nature outlined by Smith and Castree that will inform the ways in which NAWAPA’s proponents conceptualized nature. Universal nature’s exchange values do not significantly influence my thesis. Beyond asking “what is nature?” as Soper does in her 1995 book of the same title, we may also begin questioning how political ecology impacts any examination of NAWAPA. Arturo Escobar offers an anti‐essentialist definition that provides a useful starting point. Political ecology is “the study of the manifold articulations of

2 Kate Soper, “Nature/‘nature’” in Robertson, George, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, and Tim Putnam, eds. FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture. Routledge, 1996, pp. 22‐34. 3 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. University of Georgia Press, 1984, 11‐12. 4 Noel Castree, 'Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics' in Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, eds. Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics. Blackwell Publishing, 2001, 7. - 19 -

history and biology,” he argues, “and the cultural mediations through which such articulations are necessarily established.”5 Escobar maintains that his definition will help displace the predominant discourse on nature and society from the privileged grasp of Western analysis.6 One may read into this definition a space for NAWAPA as a cultural mediation through which the articulations of society to preserve a constructed second nature at the expense of first nature were established. For NAWAPA’s drafters, American history offered to reinforce their need for large‐scale diversion. They cited the centrality of water diversion projects throughout history in America and around the world in the process of nation‐building. In the United States, nowhere was this idea more applicable than in the American West. It was only later that biology – and science more broadly – came to be used as a tool against the high modernist state planners and engineers who saw first nature ecology as malleable to second nature’s social needs. It now seems like a short step from claiming societies socially construct notions of nature to the argument that those same societies physically reconstitute nature in intentional and unintentional ways. 7 The idea of the production of nature has gained increasing attention since Smith first suggested that capitalism was responsible for transforming nature into a universal mode of production, and that “the natural – in a very material way – is seen to have become internal to social processes, particularly in advanced western societies.”8 For Smith, “the production of nature implies a historical future that is still to be determined by political events and forces, not technical necessity.”9 In other words, political events will determine the capitalist mode of production, which in turn will determine the future productions of nature to suit those decisive political and capitalist purposes. In an idea that will be taken up in greater detail later, it is society in this sense that determines the extent of the production of nature: technology is merely a means to this end. David Harvey concurs that “the metaphors and patterns projected onto

5 Arturo Escobar, ‘After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology’ in Current Anthropology. Vol. 40, No. 1. February 1999, 3‐4. 6 Escobar ‘After Nature’ (note 5), 4. 7 For more on this idea, see Castree, 'Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics' (note 4). 8 Castree, 'Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics' (note 4), 15. Italics original. 9 Smith, Uneven Development (note 3), 48. - 20 -

nature are derived precisely from the human social institutions that thereby become naturalized through biological enquiry.”10 Science and technology are complicit in this socio‐economic project, working within boundaries set in place by nature “in a realist sense,” but it is society that ultimately determines what actions are ethically acceptable within these elastic boundaries.11 In a similar vein, Castree maintains that particular natural spaces will have varying social implications, changing with values and ambitions. “The physical characteristics of nature are contingent upon social practices,” he argues; “they are not fixed.”12 In another work, Castree maintains that “nature is simply a name that is ‘attached’ to all sorts of different real‐world phenomena.”13 Yet “on the ontological level,” he argues, “nature does not exist.”14 With this in mind, it is crucial to understand that this conception of the physical attributes of the natural world being contingent upon social practices extends only to those uses that the human world finds for external nature. What is the limit, however, to which one can modify nature before it ceases to be external? In the case of NAWAPA, are scientifically managed rivers, dammed to provide regulated electricity and irrigated water, natural? The idea of nature’s production raises serious questions about the nature or naturalness of this physically reconstituted landscape. Robert Goodin, for one, has argued that this is not a black and white binary between natural or unnatural, but a matter of equally natural human interventions: not of kind, but of degree. He maintains that “not all human interventions into nature are equally natural. Some may be more natural than others. It is important to recognize that humanity is part of nature and that human interventions are natural, too.”15 Goodin qualifies this statement by adding that “it is wrong to leap to treating all human interventions as if they were equally natural,” however.16 Or equally beneficial; or equally destructive. Yet this is not a universally shared assumption

10 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishing, 1996, 166. 11 Soper, “Nature/’natu re,’” (note 2), 33. 12 Castree, 'Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics' (note 4), 13. 13 Noel Castree, Nature. Routledge, 2005, 35. 14 Castree, Nature (note 13), 35. 15 Robert E. Goodin, Green Political Theory. Polity Press, 1992, 48. 16 Goodin, Green Political Theory (note 15), 48. - 21 -

among scholars. Erik Swyngedouw has built upon David Harvey’s discussion of the naturalness and ecological properties of New York City in arguing that “there is nothing a priori unnatural about produced environments such as cities, lakes, or irrigated fields.”17 While it may be true that the landscape NAWAPA would have produced might not have been a priori unnatural, this does not guarantee that the built environment atop first nature would have been a priori natural, beneficial, or even ecologically neutral at best. The Alliance could have stood as a momentous example of socio‐environmental engineering in the 1960s had it been constructed, but there is nothing a priori valuable in this. 1.2 – Motivations Behind Domination William Leiss traces the modern history of this survival motivation to the twin Enlightenment ideals of emancipation and self‐realization alongside the advent of scientific discovery. The widespread acceptance that continued mastery over nature “would effect beneficent social transformations” through new and more efficient means of science and technology became a powerful force in Western societies.18 Some form of this was present at the beginnings of the modern American hydraulic empire in the nineteenth century, in which the greatness of the nation was built upon a foundation of manipulated water systems. In some measure, the idea of America as a modern hydraulic empire still exists today.19 Yet there remains for this chapter a fundamental question that needs addressing: in the American Southwest, was it a simpler process to plan for the re‐ engineering of a continental hydraulic system for water engineers, state planners, and politicians than it was to interrogate the excesses of their social, economic and political lives? Thom Kuehls would argue it was, given his in‐depth analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophizing on nature. According to Kuehls, Nietzsche suggested that the mechanization of the world was an attempt by Western society to re‐establish order and power over what little they could – nature, in this case – following the

17 Erik Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford University Press, 2004, 23. 18 William Leiss, The Domination of Nature. George Braziller, 1972, 94. 19 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Oxford University Press, 1985, 263. - 22 -

death of God. Re‐stabilizing the natural order thrown out of sync with Western beliefs would bring security, prosperity, and power through knowledge over nature.20 Nietzsche maintained that the bulk of Western thought on nature had not progressed from within the “shadow of God,” arguing in The Will to Power that for humanity, “nature remained nothing but a created object, created, moreover, for mankind’s explicit and narrow uses.”21 In the same way that many in nineteenth century Western society could not begin to fathom a world without God in which the earth might not have been made for humanity’s divine use, NAWAPA must have struck Western politicians and engineers as an infinitely safer and more stable option than introspection. To implement NAWAPA did not risk revealing the shallowness of a society based upon unchecked consumption and capital accumulation for its own sake. And NAWAPA would not have exposed that the proposed solutions to the problem of ecoscarcity were the same as the causes of the ecological crisis Americans were attempting to rout. The notion that “the individual naturally prefers those measures that add to his pleasure but cost him nothing,” and “hesitates when a desirable objective involves much personal expense” was commonplace. 22 The Alliance would also have struck commentators interested in the preservation of American lifestyles as the ultimate method with which to achieve their goals without any requisite behavioral modifications. In 1985, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney called for an inquiry into federal water policy, the findings of which would help inform Canada’s trade negotiations with the United States during the free trade debates in 1988. In The Economics of Water Export Policy, one research paper among many presented to the Inquiry on Federal Water Policy, UBC economist Anthony Scott argued that “the impoundment, storage and delivery of Canadian water…would be a very attractive alternative to developing the political will to make better use of the water supplies already available in the south and

20 Thom Kuehls, Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of Ecopolitics. Borderlines, Vol. 4. University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 7. 21 Kuehls, Beyond Sovereign Territory (note 20), 11. 22 Raymond Dasmann in ‘The Conservation Foundation.’ Darling, F. Fraser and John P. Milton, eds. Future Environments of North America. The Natural History Press, 1965, 327‐328. - 23 -

southwestern United States.”23 This is understandably consequential. At the 1975 Pacific Science Congress, Dr. Ian McTaggart‐Cowan observed that “as we look towards the end of the twentieth century…we see…this diversity [of the natural world] threatened by dominant societies pursuing goals that, though they have produced a rich material culture, are already eroding the sources of their original stimulus.”24 Yet many, including Democratic Congressman Jim Wright of Texas, felt that the problem originated in nature’s illogical distribution of water resources. “Too much of the best water is available in the wrong places,” he argued, adding that “since we can’t move all the people to where the water is, obviously we need to move the water to where the people are.”25 The paradox is that NAWAPA would have helped to produce a larger society in the American Southwest while continuing to erode the temporarily larger water resource base they acquired through the plan. Despite Congressman Wright’s flippant disregard for the natural world, the relief many in the Southwest so hoped for would not have come without its own set of problems for those living where water was scarce. James Scott would argue that from the state’s perspective, those same politicians and engineers who fixated upon NAWAPA had more than safety and stability in mind. The ideas behind high modernist intervention into nature were shaped by a modern faith in science similar to that function previously performed by God. No small part of the legitimacy and appeal of the state depended upon a faith that was sold to society as vouchsafed only by scientists, engineers, planners, and the politicians who instituted these policies.26 How did it come about that politicians came to embrace high modernist planning as engineers and scientists had before them? Considering the power of large‐scale engineering projects to unify society towards a common objective, it is unsurprising that politicians should have embraced the power of high modernism given its value in the process of nation

23 Anthony Scott, Joe Olynyk and Steven Renzetti. Inquiry on Federal Water Policy. Research Paper #7. The Economics of Water Export Policy. Queen’s Printer, 1985, 21‐22. 24 Dr. Ian McTaggert‐Cowan, quoted in Justice Thomas R. Berger. Ministry of Supply and Services Canada. Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland. Queen’s Printer, 1977, 199. 25 Jim Wright. The Coming Water Famine, Coward‐McCann Inc., 1963, 216‐217. 26 James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998, 342. - 24 -

building. Grand socio‐political objectives contain the ability to captivate and mobilize a nation: cross‐continental railroads, space programmes, undersea tunnels linking islands to continents, and massive damming proposals. NAWAPA fits with the grandiose theme in state planning prevalent in Western society since the nineteenth century, and typical of the 1960s, despite this being a moment of transition in the twentieth century. In this sense, it was capable of providing so much more than “irrigation and power systems.”27 NAWAPA, to borrow Scott’s phrase, was an example of “industrial strength social engineering” whereby the American state attempted to remove limits to growth in regions where development had historically been encouraged. 28 Yet Scott has genuine respect for the planners and engineers who created these plans, despite the hubris with which they approached external nature and society. “Their actions,” he claims, “far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition” – however misguided, and regardless of the consequences.29 However, Soper notes ironically that “the same mythologies about our common heritage and the common land,” which helped develop the land in the name of larger socio‐political purposes, “have helped to sustain the power and property of those most directly responsible for ecological destruction.”30 She grounds this argument in a concept she refers to as “nature in the realist sense”: “the nature whose structures and processes are independent of human activity…and whose forces and causal powers are the condition of and constraint upon any human practice or technological activity, however Promethean in ambition.”31 It is valuable to parallel this humbling check to human ambition with engineering schemes like NAWAPA: that regardless of what humanity does to manipulate and

27 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, TechnoPolitics, Modernity. University of California Press, 2002, 44. 28 Scott, Seeing Like a State (note 26), 91. 29 Scott, Seeing Like a State (note 26), 342. 30 For similar arguments regarding organizations who have created problems of ecological destruction and capitalized on them, only to suggest themselves as impartial agents best situated to solve the environmental crisis, see Soper, “Nature/’nature,’” (note 2), 24; Simon Dalby, ‘Threats from the South?’ in Deudney, D., ed. Contested Grounds. State University of New York Press, 1999; Daniel H. Deudney, ‘Environmental Security: A Critique’ in Deudney, D., ed. Contested Grounds. State University of New York Press, 1999; and Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature. Yale University Press, 2005. 31 Soper, “Nature/’nature,’” (note 2), 31. - 25 -

master nature for human purposes, “however Promethean in ambition,” nature in the realist sense is always present and immutable, capable of destroying everything that humans have mobilized nature to create. Yet “if values are socially and economically anchored” as Naess argues, “then the philosophical task” for humanity, according to Harvey, “is to challenge those instrumental values [within society] which alienate.”32 Human and natural values are not static, nor should they be interpreted as straight‐jacketing humanity into a world predetermined by technological advances. Whereas early characterizations of nature depicted an environment in which humans had to struggle for survival against an inhospitable landscape, Smith reminds us that “the humanized nature lionized by the late 19th century ‘back to nature’ movement was quintessentially friendly. Hostile or friendly, nature was external: it was “a world to be conquered or a place to go back to,” and never a place where you actually were. 33 This detachment from nature played no small role in convincing humans that in order to benefit from the emerging industrial capitalist state and its global ambitions of wealth, nature had to be made over into something existing to subsidize human welfare, and not left as a place where one could belong as one can to a nation constructed by human ambition and design. These are quite different concepts to be sure, but they are linked in fundamental ways: the idea that natural resources could be used to further the cause of human welfare does not necessitate the scale with which humanity has exploited nature, nor has it required the psychological separation of nature‐as‐home from nature‐as‐commodity. It questions whether western societies made nature external to simplify the process of exploitation for capitalist gain. What needs to be understood is that for NAWAPA to have succeeded as a component of the larger efforts of capitalism to conquer the natural world, nature must be overwhelmingly conceptualized in North America as nothing more than a set of commodified resources, or as tools utilized in the realization of Enlightenment ideals.

32 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 168. 33 Smith, Uneven Development (note 3), 21. - 26 -

1.3 – Capitalist Nature and Value In its ability to produce nature, capitalism is not unique among ideologies: Marx himself had little objecton to the overall Enlightenment project and its vision of dominating nature as a means of emancipation from social want (though he did take exception to the particular ways in which this domination had been manifested under capitalism).34 In fact, as Harvey points out, it appears that the two most fundamental streams of modern socio‐political thought appear to possess at least a common acceptance of the domination of nature as their basis.35 What is unique to capitalism in the production of nature is the global scale at which it has been able to accomplish its feats: concerned only with fulfilling the singular need for profit, capitalism has been unable (or unwilling) to conceive of natural attributes as anything but natural resources, attaching arbitrary exchange values to them which determines their fate.36 In Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Harvey references a passage by Emile Zola in which “money, aiding science, yielded progress,” a claim that Harvey argues “has been at the centre of capitalist culture and its Promethean historical geography of environmental transformations.”37 The real question, as Frankfurt School philosophers noted, is “how the Enlightenment ideals have been frustrated by the very philosophical and political‐ economic shifts and practices designed to realize them.”38 In shifting their critique from capitalism specifically to Western civilization more broadly, Frankfurt School thinkers moved beyond the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism to focus on the domination of nature through the domination of man.39 Max Horkheimer, one of the principal members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, argued that “nature is today more than ever conceived as a mere tool of man. It is the object of total exploitation that has no aim set by reason, and therefore no limit.”40 This

34 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 127. 35 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 127. 36 Smith, Uneven Development (note 3), 28. 37 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 133. 38 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 134. 39 Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 19231950. Little and Brown, 1973, 53. 40 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason. Continuum, 1987, 108. - 27 - thinking sought to “challenge the hegemony of instrumental rationality” and replace it with an “alternative rationality that had the power to give a deeper sense of meaning to life.” Additionally, the Frankfurt School replaced the Marxist emphasis on class struggle with a broader struggle “between man and nature both without and within.”41 In so doing, the Frankfurt School broke with a more traditional critique of capitalism to focus instead on the more critical human‐nature relationship, a conflict Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno felt pre‐dated capitalism and would continue, if not intensify after capitalism ended.42 One of the ways in which the Enlightenment ideals have been frustrated, according to James O’Conner, is that capitalist restructuring today takes place at the expense of production conditions, chief among them nature. One of the ways in which nature can be made increasingly profitable is to generate more from scarcer resources. The “second contradiction of capitalism” is making nature as a universal mode of production all the more difficult to sustain as a resource, let alone as a mode of production.43 One example of this can be seen clearly in the dropping water levels at the Hoover Dam.44 Infrastructure built to further utilize nature as a mode of capitalist production – not to mention the further demonstrated mastery over nature – is now working too well: the Enlightenment ideal of human emancipation was achieved long ago for some, but the equally crucial pillar of self‐realization through self‐preservation is beginning to crumble under the scale of capitalist conquest. Another example of the second contradiction of capitalism is ecoscarcity as a veil for continued bourgeois domination of the labouring classes within the West and the entirety of the Global South. Enlightenment ideals have been frustrated in their realization because their proponents could not have accounted for the impact and scale of humanity’s greed in search of security and profit, and the quick shift from safeguarding for needs to safeguarding desires. A detailed understanding of what constitutes ecoscarcity – or even if there indeed was a

41 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 135. 42 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 133; Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (note 39), 256. 43 James O’Conner, quoted in Escobar, ‘After Nature’ (note 5), 7. 44 Glen MacDonald, Address to the President’s Plenary Session. American Association of Geographers Annual General Meeting. Las Vegas, Nevada. March 22, 2009. - 28 -

shortage of freshwater in the American Southwest at the time – is unnecessary here. What is critical to understand, however, is that in the 1950s and 1960s there existed a palpable anxiety over water scarcity in North America regardless of its actuality. Water, or even historically cheap freshwater, did not have to be in short supply for many North Americans to adopt an attitude of fear over water’s perceived shortages, which many in government and academia in both Canada and the United States. In assuming that freshwater resources were dwindling, and that preservation efforts, lifestyle changes, and pollution abatement would prove insufficient or impossible to solve the crisis, these proponents of NAWAPA – or NAWAPA‐like water diversion schemes – thereby expanded the realm of acceptable consequences to be incurred in the securing of water resources at a moment of profound ecoscarcity. David Harvey has argued that “to speak in money terms is always to speak in a language which the holders of social power appreciate and understand.” 45 Because of this, any discussion of the capitalist impact upon the production, conception, and ultimate domination of nature must begin with an understanding of value and the competing ways in which it is currently conceptualized. Robert Goodin has outlined three theories of value, and while the capitalist (consumer‐ based) and Marxist (producer‐based) theories are worthwhile, it is Goodin’s green theory of value that informs my work. Goodin is interested in the outcome found at the crossroads of Capitalist and Marxist theories of value on one hand, and the notions of value implied in Naess’s notions of shallow and deep ecology on the other. This hybridized theory of value – what Goodin labels a “green theory of value”– is defined as “a natural resource based theory of value, more properly – but awkwardly – theorized as a natural attribute based theory of value,” in which the value of things is linked to “some naturally occurring properties of the objects themselves,”46 or what is referred to hence as the “intrinsic value” of natural properties.

45 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 150. 46 Goodin, Green Political Theory (note 17), 24. - 29 -

It is necessary to discuss the importance of understanding Goodin’s green theory of value in relation to NAWAPA for the contrast it provides to the more traditional understanding of value that many of NAWAPA’s proponents utilized. Those who argued for the logical necessity of the Alliance actively linked natural value to a capitalist understanding of nature whereby natural attributes and resources possessed value only in relation to the arbitrary exchange values attached to them. Goodin’s theory is of particular note here for its belief that natural attributes are held to be valuable regardless of the price they might fetch on the market, and any discussion of value introduces ecological, social, emotional, spiritual, and even aesthetic appreciations of nature that are missing when the central method of valuation is money. Conversely, it remains necessary to demonstrate the various ways in which nature does possess an intrinsic value to both the natural landscape and the human populations who live as dependents on that land, though if the green theory of value were the dominant method of valuation, the pressure to prove nature’s non‐commercial worth is lessened. As a theory focused on natural attributes (resources) and the ecological/ capitalist manner of their extraction or securing, the green theory of value is an excellent approach for understanding the complex interactions between capital and ecology and the ways these became manifest in the NAWAPA plans. The process of attributing value to a natural object or resource is often less than scientific: “value” itself is scientifically compromised, too socially and individually implicit in the “metaphors deployed in mounting specific lines of scientific inquiry.”47 Goodin turns his attention to the ways in which the green theory of value draws unashamedly upon the shallow notion of ecology in arguing that “things can only have value ‘in relation to us’” while distancing his theory from the idea that things in nature can only have value “to us or for us.”48 In formulating his green political theory, Goodin drew upon Arne Naess’s theory of deep and shallow ecology, using characteristics of each to demonstrate that the two are not mutually exclusive.

47 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 162. 48 Goodin, Green Political Theory (note 15), 44. Italics original. - 30 -

Goodin’s analysis deviates from Naess’s deep ecology when he maintains that “natural objects…actually create value when – only when – in the presence of (human) consciousness.”49 It is here that he introduces his idea that “values presuppose valuers,” and that the process of “valuing involves active consciousness – and that human beings are the only creatures on earth with adequately sophisticated consciousness for this purpose.”50 Harvey concurs that “the ability to discover intrinsic values depends, then, on the ability of human subjects endowed with consciousness and reflexive as well as practical capacities to become neutral mediators of what those values might be.”51 In other words, by placing human beings alongside a nature that possesses an intrinsic value determined by humans and some undetermined higher notion at the centre of his value theory, Goodin is seeking to bypass the often inescapable binary that can develop between capitalist and Marxist theories of value, and shallow and deep ecological perspectives. The green theory of value fits into the already multi‐layered conception of NAWAPA as a capitalist project, one intent upon the socio‐natural re‐engineering of the North American landscape and the societies therein. Yet by understanding NAWAPA within a green theory of value framework that already presupposes an inherent value in natural landscapes and attributes, there exists “an immediate sense of ontological security and permanence” already present in the nature under analysis.52 While Castree may take exception to this, arguing that nature does not exist at the ontological level, the hope and promise that societies invest in nature accords it value above and beyond being a mere name attached to “real‐world phenomena.”53 Nature, whatever its conception, is vital in all ontological efforts in pursuit of understanding the nature of existence and the role that humanity plays in shaping the natural world. Finally, according to Naess, while advocating for a deep ecological framework through which to consider the human‐nature relationship, and not explicitly for the

49 Goodin, Green Political Theory (note 15), 45. 50 Goodin, Green Political Theory (note 15), 44. 51 Harvey, Geogra phy of Difference (note 10), 157. 52 Harvey, Geogra phy of Difference (note 10), 157. 53 Castree, Nature (note 14), 35. - 31 - green theory of value, “there is prestige in consumption and waste in our society,” concluding that “present ideology tends to value things because they are scarce and are assumed to have a greater market‐value because of this.”54 The idea of consumption and water possessing prestige in North American society will be further explored in subsequent chapters where the preservation of unsustainable lifestyles is discussed in depth. The essential question here is why is it assumed that scientific and technological domination over nature will inevitably and logically lead to both the satisfaction of human needs and desires and its negative consequence, the domination of human beings. We may also ask why governments have so frequently assumed that the scientific and technological domination of nature would never generate resentment amongst certain elements of the population (those alienated from resources, ecologists, human populations unconsidered in the planning process, among others) and reactions from external nature itself? In North America, it was rightly assumed that if nature could be tamed, and the rivers‐as‐resources made to pay, then the human labour needed in its wake could be controlled and managed by those who held social power over those who had only their labour to sell. Scientific rationality, a social concept that made altering the landscape by taming the rivers possible, also made possible the domination of people dependent upon tamed nature for their livelihoods. This is capital and science walking hand in hand. 1.4 – Science and Technology in the Transformation of Nature The advent of large‐scale scientific and technological advancements during the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century led to a world in which natural resources, or natural attributes more broadly, came to be regarded largely as tools to help further the cause of human welfare. This had the effect of creating societies in which human desires gradually came to replace human needs: or what Horkheimer understood as a world of “means rather than of ends,” itself a

54 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1991, 31. - 32 -

consequence of the “historical development of the methods of production.”55 He goes on to associate the need to fulfill human desires with the need to fulfill the human ego, a “boundless imperialism” that is never satisfied.56 Yet as Smith indicates, the “combined reification and mystification that result from equating nature with use‐value are hallmarks of the bourgeois concept of nature,” evidenced in the rising disparity between those classes that could afford human desires, and those that could not. 57 It was difficult for many Canadians (and some Americans as well) to accept NAWAPA’s declaration, espoused by its champions such as Frank Moss, Jim Wright, and Ralph Parsons, that it meant only to acquire surplus Canadian freshwater for the purposes of increased irrigated agriculture to feed all Americans (and some Canadians, too), and increase the industrial output of the American Southwest to ensure employment for those who had nothing more to offer than their labour. Many remained skeptical. “‘Nature transforming’ projects of any sort have distributional consequences,” according to Harvey, “and the patent inequity of many of these has been the source of powerful conflicts.”58 It was clear that NAWAPA’s “distributional consequences” included many of the proposed benefits under the plan (increased acre‐feet irrigation, construction and maintenance contracts, canal and barge tolls, etc.). This must also include matters of sovereignty, power, wealth, and ecologcal burden more broadly. The flexible identity of water(itself the resource awaiting redistribution) also impacted the nature of the NAWAPA debate. At root, those contesting the merits of the Alliance were debating the extent to which nature as a means of preserving unsustainable Northern lifestyles was to be transformed in the process. Water became a useful substitute for larger issues such sovereignty, development, and growth: and while nature seldom emerged throughout the debate as the issue under consideration, water stood in as the focal point for an issue that transcended simpler matters of acre‐feet and dam construction.

55 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (note 40), 102. 56 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (note 40), 108. 57 Smith, Uneven Development (note 3), 44. 58 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 137. - 33 -

The natural world was not formed with individual attributes and resources in mind – this was only a human categorization of nature placed atop the natural world once humans had successfully completed their shift towards nature’s centre. Natural attributes simply remained components of the environment upon which humanity could draw for subsistence. The “application of scientific and social scientific expertise,” according to Timothy Mitchell, would change that.59 He argues that “the resources and limits of nature…were to be transformed by the dynamic activity of technical development,” an act that ensured a binary view of the world in which “science was opposed to nature and technical expertise [could] claim to overcome the obstacles to social improvement.”60 In many ways, this binary has never definitively ended, and the high modernist alliance between science and the state became a crucial agent in NAWAPA’s proposal and nature’s re‐engineering. What, therefore, are the socio‐technical processes involved in transforming a natural attribute into a “natural resource,” burdened as it is with the “cultural, technical, and economic appraisal of elements and processes in nature that can be applied to fulfill social objectives and goals?”61 Swyngedouw argues that water became a commodity by virtue of its ability to express “the social relationships within the space through which it circulated and to which it gave form and content,” adding that “the biological necessity of water ensured that urbanization was predicated upon organizing, controlling, and mastering its socio‐natural circulation.”62 The urbanization process in the American Southwest presupposed that water would be perpetually available, that growth would be manageable, and that technology could be used to solve any problems that threatened growth. It was a system premised on the assumption that nature, once tamed, would continue to co‐operate as it always had despite increased demands upon it. Swyngedouw’s work on social power and its relation to water in the urbanization process posits water (ecology), because of its “life giving and sustaining use‐value,” as central to comprehending the power relationships

59 Mitchell, Rule of Experts (note 27), 50. 60 Mitchell, Rule of Experts (note 27), 51. 61 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 10), 147. 62 Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (note 17), 30. - 34 -

(politics) of everyday life.63 The water/money/power nexus which he introduces as a “conceptual triage” to lay bare “the political economy of the urban fabric” also helps to position the central importance of water circulations to the wider political, economic, social, and ecological processes that influenced the NAWAPA plan.64 The benefits of manipulating the natural world became obvious: guaranteeing the security of the species through the mastery of nature and the security of the individual through access to productive labour, the spoils of capitalist gain, the advent of urbanization, and the marvels of modern technology.65 Keeping in mind that ecoscarcity was predominantly more a prevailing social anxiety than a physical reality throughout the American Southwest in the 1960s, California was hit with the worst drought in its history almost a decade after NAWAPA slipped from public consciousness. “Had it lasted one more year,” Marc Reisner notes wryly, “its citizens might have begun migrating back east, their mattresses strapped to the tops of their Porsches and BMWs.” 66 For Reisner, this indicated the “hollowness” of the Southwestern American triumph over nature. It was a triumph built upon a shifting foundation, one in which a stable supply of water was assumed, though never guaranteed. It was also a triumph in which “logic and reason have never figured prominently” according to Reisner, because “as long as [America] maintains a civilization in a semidesert with a desert heart, the yearning to civilize more of it will always be there.”67 That the American Southwest did not face water shortages on the scale prophesized by NAWAPA’s proponents, and that almost five decades later the region still continues its almost unparalleled growth without the North American Water and Power Alliance in place, is evidence of the West’s dubious desire for Canadian freshwater. It also demonstrates that little has been learned of the hazards of unchecked growth in a region which has been unable to support a large population without massive individual and later state

63 Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (note 17), 2. 64 Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (note 17), 2. 65 Leiss, The Domination of Nature (note 18), 101‐102. 66 Marc Reisner. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Viking Press, 1986, 14. 67 Reisner, Cadillac Desert (note 66), 14. - 35 -

intervention into the natural world. This idea will be taken up at greater length in the following chapter. A water diversion proposal that disregards its social impacts and a society that denies its utter dependency upon water are “radically incomplete as portraits of their shared world.”68 Questions of nature (its production, its value, its conceptions) will be considered alongside their relationship with science and technology, the role of Capitalism in nature, and perceptions of the environment in relation to sovereignty and territoriality, considered within the context of Canada in the 1960s. But it is now necessary to look back to the history of water projects in the West in both America and Canada to understand how NAWAPA fits into the continuum of North American water development.

68 William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, W.W. Norton and Company, 1991, 51. - 36 -

Chapter Two – Water in the American and Canadian Wests

“The West is our most myth‐shrouded region, so much so that we often cannot say where its actual physical boundaries are.” – Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature

When the North American Water and Power Alliance first entered the continental consciousness in the mid‐1960s, it was no isolated case of socio‐natural reengineering. Rather, NAWAPA became a prime example of the American state’s effort at what James Scott termed ‘high modernist’ state planning.1 The post‐World War Two American landscape helped Western residents proclaim that their efforts at re‐engineering water systems was enough to ensure that the myth of the American West as an Empire in its own right was now fact.2 And after the Columbia River Treaty was ratified in 1964, it appeared as if the doors were open to the continued expansion of the American hydraulic Empire, and that NAWAPA would be its Trojan Horse into the northern regions of the continent.3 But before a proposal of NAWAPA’s scope and scale can be understood as the logical extension of Western water development in the 1960s, NAWAPA must be situated within the comparative histories of Western water development in Canada and the United States since the beginning of the nineteenth century. My emphasis will be on the role of water in the American West. Donald Worster’s discussion of water and nature in Rivers of Empire has struck an important balance between understanding the influence of capitalist underpinnings inherent in these efforts at socio‐natural re‐engineering and never losing sight of the natural world re‐imagined under threat of routine violence. It is Worster’s nuanced approach to western water development that I have adopted for my discussion of nature and capital in NAWAPA. The focus on the American Southwest is deliberate: when the Alliance was proposed, it was by an American engineering firm based in Los Angeles, one of the most highly populated cities in the region. Any examination of the United States as an hydraulic empire must begin and end in the American

1 James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998. 2 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Oxford University Pre ss, 1985, 14‐15. 3 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 15. - 37 -

West, though this is not to say that its influence does not extent well beyond what is understood as the American Southwest, crossing both state and national boundaries in the process. Parallels between the Canadian and American Western experiences will be drawn as water and the West pertain to the formation of distinct national mythologies. In the United States, national identity in the West was based on rugged, frontier individualism and the spread of democratic values as theorized by Frederick Jackson Turner. While problematic on its own as a theory of American development, the frontier thesis is crucial for understanding how the American West evolved in the late nineteenth century because of the extent to which Americans truly believed the frontier thesis to be an accurate portrayal of American values and ideals. This is the sense in which the frontier thesis will be used in this chapter. In Canada, it was the maintenance of law, order, and metropolitan ideals as argued by Donald Creighton and J.M.S. Careless that gave Western development a distinguishing Canadian flavour.4 While half a century divides the work of Turner from that of Creighton and Careless, their efforts at using the relationship of the people to the land in understanding how American and Canadian identities developed in their respective Western regions warrants further comparison. The first half of the twentieth century belonged to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, and their increasingly grandiose re‐engineering schemes in the United States. It was believed by boosters of Western development in government and business that in remaking the West, the Bureau of Reclamation (or simply the Bureau, as it was commonly known) was remaking America. In continuing their historic march westward begun with the earliest pioneer efforts to control small rivers and streams for subsistence purposes, it was felt that the Bureau was attempting to control all aspects of the land to bring wild nature to heel before the mighty presence of American technological power. The litany of water development projects which emerged on the heels of the Bureau’s official founding in 1902 kept water developers, engineers, and planners busy through to the 1960s

4 See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Penguin Books, 2008; also see Paul Fox’s interview with Donald Creighton, ‘Alternatives to the Frontier Thesis’ in Cross, Michael S., ed. The Frontier Thesis and the Canadas: The Debate on the Impact of the Canadian Environment. Copp Clark Publishing Company, 1970, 40‐41. - 38 -

and beyond. Yet despite decades of increasingly intensive projects by the Bureau in which the goal was nothing short of ensuring water security for the Southwest vis‐à‐ vis the re‐engineering of the American landscape, the perils of unchecked population, industrial, and agricultural growth and their increasing pressures upon water resources began undermining America’s traditional sources of development. While most plans dealt with rivers solely within American territory, such as the completion of the Hoover Dam in Nevada in 1936 and the authorization of the Central Valley Project in California in 1933, the possibilities for continued domestic projects in the West became increasingly limited. The Columbia River project, which entered the drafting stage in the late 1940s and was ratified in 1964, was the immediate precursor to NAWAPA and was a Bureau project. The enlarged Columbia River Treaty between Canada and the United States is notable for the crucial precedent it set regarding water withdrawal between the two nations, and the subsequent scepticism among Canadians when NAWAPA was proposed the same year the Treaty was ratified. Some draw a direct connection between the selling of Canadian water at “distress prices” found in the Columbia Treaty with the swift reaction of Parson’s company in drafting and releasing the NAWAPA plan.5 As such, there is a clear progression in the evolution of water development in the American West from the first efforts at water diversion for small‐scale irrigation to the re‐ engineering of a continent’s water systems. 2.1 – Frontier Thesis and Metropolitanism The promises of westward expansion in the early nineteenth century carried all the pomp and glory of a sacred myth of national origin. It is unsurprising that the legacy of conquest and western expansion would become immortalized in both the concept of American manifest destiny and Frederick Jackson Tuner’s frontier thesis, which, though highly scrutinized by subsequent scholars, has never left the centre of debate on the West in American history. Turner himself asks “what is the West?,” and argues that to understand the answer to this question is to understand the most

5 Laratt Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources: The Case of the Columbia River Treaty’ in Lumsden, Ian, ed. Close the 49th Parallel: The Americanization of Canada. University of Toronto Press, 1970, 237. - 39 -

significant issue in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.6 The frontier thesis was Turner’s consolidated musings on the importance of the West in shaping not only the American political scene, but the identity of the American nation. The people of the West were, above all, idealists: their efforts at developing the West were crucial to the advancement of truly American values. The people who populated the West, unlike urban dwellers in the East, “dreamed dreams and beheld visions. [They] had faith in man, hope for democracy, belief in America’s destiny, [and] unbounded confidence in his ability to make his dreams come true.”7 When Turner speaks of the West, he is speaking of the frontier, though not of wilderness, which Turner felt disappeared with the advent of the West. But the frontier thesis is more than an attempt to explain the West to an Eastern audience who simply cannot understand the lifestyles west of the Appalachian mountains. “The West, at bottom,” Turner argues, “is a form of society, rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land.”8 In this, as in other passages, the emphasis is routinely on the social and national character of the West, much more than any discussion of what physically constitutes “the West” as a geographic region. Turner is more interested in how the West as an idea is responsible for creating new imaginative geographies, new opportunities, and new institutions and ideals that can only prosper in an environment where freedom from state, legal, and social restraints is paramount. Turner’s thesis is comforting and alluring, allowing one to easily visualize the vastness and glory of the Western landscape. But while the frontier thesis as an adequate theory of Western development has largely been discredited, Turner and the frontier thesis “as a process, as a symbol of the continuing American commitment to progress and improvement,” remains a powerful way in which to understand the strength of the West, its lifestyles, and its demands. 9 As William

6 Tuner, Frontier Thesis (note 4), 39. 7 Tuner, Frontier Thesis (note 4), 49. 8 Tuner, Frontier Thesis (note 4), 39. 9 Michael S. Cross, ‘Introduction’ in Cross, Michael S., ed. The Frontier Thesis and the Canadas: The Debate on the Impact of the Canadian Environment. Copp Clark Publishing Company, 1970, 1‐2. - 40 -

Cronon maintains, “we have not yet found a way to escape him.”10 Yet Donald Worster claims that the frontier thesis was largely based on Turner’s experience in the forested region of Wisconsin. According to Worster, it remains a theory that “has no water, no aridity, no technical dominance in it, that indeed has very little in it of the West as it is geographically defined today.”11 Its distance from what is commonly considered as “the West” today, and its failure to address issues such as aridity ensures that for Worster, the frontier thesis holds little significant value. Yet in less concrete ways, the frontier’s strength rested on its appeal to the American imagination.12 The same allure that the frontier possessed in America was paralleled in the Canadian notion of metropolitanism, the idea that “culture, capital investment, political ideas, [and] social organization,” flow outward from the metropolis to the hinterland, conveying the more Canadian ideals of law and order based squarely in governmental structures, rather than frontier individualism.13 Both concepts recognized the importance of democratic ideals, as well as the interconnections between the frontier/hinterland and the metropolis, though each found a different source for that democracy, and emphasized dissimilar directions for the flow of ideas. Despite the divergence in emphasis and their relation to the Old World, Worster is quick to indicate that both the American and Canadian conceptions of the West and wilderness ended in “a powerful industrialist‐capitalist economy ransacking the land for raw materials.”14 Each understanding of Western expansion shared a common, consuming passion with development. According to Worster, “development became a transitive verb” in the nineteenth century, “with humans as the subject, and nature as the object.”15 It was now the responsibility of humanity to ‘develop nature’ as a means

10 William Cronon, ‘Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner’ in The Western Historical Quarterly. Vol. 18, No. 2. April, 1987, pp. 157‐176. 11 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 11. 12 Richard Hofstadter, ‘Turner and the Frontier Myth.’ The American Scholar; Vol. 18, No. 4. Autumn 1949, 435. 13 Creighton ‘Alternatives to the Frontier Thesis’ (note 4), 41. 14 Donald Worster, ‘Two Faces West: The Development Myth in Canada and the United States’ in Hirt, Paul W., ed. Terra Pacifica: People and Place in the Northwest States and Western Canada. Washington State University Press, 1998, 76‐77. 15 Worster, ‘Two Faces West’ (note 14), 73. - 41 -

of ensuring not only its physical survival, but the survival and ultimate growth of the nation‐state. This is the common thread of development that weaves through the history of the West in both Canada and the United States, but both nations approached it from unique perspectives. For Turner, Americans saw development as a means of “multiple new beginnings,” free of the prejudices and problems of the Old World. “Decade after decade, West after West,” Turner claimed, This perennial rebirth… this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish[es] the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the Great West.16

Canadians were inclined to approach development as a more “straightforward march, controlled and directed by metropolitan forces far removed from the interior,” while witnessing their development as such.17 In the United States, while Western growth was also directed from Eastern metropolitan centres of finance and government, Western Americans were much less inclined to understand their progress as something being directed by the East.18 In many respects, little has changed. W.T. Easterbrook, a political economist at the University of Toronto, built upon the earlier work of Harold Innis in arguing that Canada had locked itself into a resource extraction cycle dating back to the earliest days of colonial expansion, when development was guaranteed only through the use of foreign capital to feed raw materials to foreign markets.19 And despite dramatic shifts in the Canadian resource base, this “narrow channeling of resource investment,” in addition to the colonial mentality, has remained.20 Other historians shy away from the frontier/ metropolitan discussion, or choose to downplay Worster’s emphasis on development. In Colony and Empire, William Robbins argues that capitalism, not development, is “the common factor essential to understanding power, influence, and change in the American West from

16 Tuner, Frontier Thesis (note 4), 40. 17 Worster, ‘Two Faces West’ (note 14), 75. 18 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 281‐284. 19 W.T. Easterbrook, quoted in Resources for Tomorrow Conference, Montreal, Quebec. October 23‐ 28, 1961. Vol. 3 – Proceedings of the Conference. Queen’s Printer, 1961, 17. 20 W.T. Easterbrook, Resources for Tomorrow Conference (note 20), 18. - 42 -

the onset of the fur trade to the present.”21 Robbins argues that major expansion in western America – and Canada, to a lesser extent – stemmed from the constantly shifting dynamics of domestic, and later global capital and the pressures that specific needs at specific moments in time placed upon the capacity of the West to meet those needs. The fur trade, the demographic shift westward, the transportation and industrial revolutions, the explosion of science and technology as life‐altering forces, the exploitation of nature, and the creation of a new infrastructure designed to achieve this exploitation were all “manifestations of the influence of global capital.”22 Taking these arguments as two examples among many, it is possible to begin understanding the similarities and differences in western experiences in Canada and the United States. 2.2 – Early Water Development: Riparianism and Prior Appropriation In the American West, early settlement in what is now Utah, California, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Wyoming all began with small‐scale efforts at river diversion to provide adequate irrigation for crops. Those arriving in this region in the mid‐nineteenth century found their water needs and interests butting heads with the needs of settlers already on the land. Large groups of miners and prospectors who moved west for the 1849 Gold Rush operated under the mantra of “whatever you can use, use, because God will be pleased by your enterprise and society forever in your debt.”23 Various Native populations whose entitlement to the land and water was never considered beyond reservations also had designs upon western rivers. Yet the influx of settlers seeking land and water to establish new homesteads reached its first barrier in determining access to increasingly scarce river water when previously established settlements possessed much of the existing land adjacent to the river. Here the Old World English notion of riparianism, maintaining that only those living on the banks of the river could obtain access to its use, was pitted against the more American doctrine of prior appropriation based on “cowboy

21 William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capital Transformation of the American West. University of K ansas Press, 1994, 7. 22 Robbins, Colony and Empire (note 21), xi. 23 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 89‐90. - 43 -

logic,” according to Vandana Shiva, which argued that the first person to lay claim to the water adjacent their land took a vested interest in that water, making it a form of personal property.24 The conceptual difficulty of thinking of rivers in terms of property and ownership is matched only by the greater – and more socially and politically sensitive – task of hierarchically organizing the various and competing social uses of that river, be it for farming, mining, ranching, or municipal uses.25 This is exactly the task which fell to the state when Americans, not of the Old World and uninclined to place arbitrary limits upon their freedom, opted to implement the competitive notion of prior appropriation over the more co‐ operative riparian doctrine. 26 For Turner, settlers’ location west of the Eastern Seaboard made them “free from European precedents and forces.”27 The impacts of prior appropriation had far reaching and long‐lasting implications: not only did it help foster a general acceptance of nature and natural resources as detached from the human world, but it reinforced the notion of manifest destiny as an unstoppable force in American agricultural, industrial, demographic, and territorial development. It transformed water from a communal resource into private property while developing within water law a “curious doctrine of waste.”28 And this impression of nature, coupled with the whirlwind scientific and technological improvements to dam building, irrigation, and crop cultivation brought about by the industrial revolutions, ensured that American expansion should know no earthly bounds. Belief in the infallibility of technological progress over nature (including human nature) became the backbone of American strength in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While known for his anti‐American leanings, Canadian philosopher George Grant argued that “American supremacy is identified with the belief that questions of human good are to be solved by technology; that the most

24 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 88; also see Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit. South End Press, 2002, 22‐23. 25 Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. W.W. Norton & Com pany, 1987, 72‐73. 26 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 89. 27 Tuner, Frontier Thesis (note 4), 45. 28 Robert Glennon, Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters. Island Press, 2002, 17. - 44 -

important human activity is the pursuit of those sciences which issue in the conquest of human and nonhuman nature.”29 Post‐Revolution America had made a definitive break with the Old World in particular, and with the past in general. According to David Lowenthal, “Jefferson’s ‘sovereignty of the present generation’ applied no less to law than to landscape,” an attitude which permeated the American relationship with the land.30 Devoid of history, Americans set out to “deify nature” by substituting it for a past they had rejected in favour of a future of their own making.31 In staking their future to a pliant nature, it is little wonder that many felt every effort should be made to ensure that nature would co‐operate with the American project. Yet the seeming irrationality of nature in directing vast quantities of resources to regions of the continent devoid of human settlement, and other natural checks to human welfare, were seen as direct challenges to the nation which Americans had consciously created for themselves. Science and technology, in the form of engineering methods capable of forcing nature into behaving rationally, began as of the late nineteenth century guaranteeing the provision of unlimited plenty so long elusive to the state planner.32 In fact, as Irving Fox and Lyle Craine argued at the Resources for Tomorrow Conference, held in Montreal in 1961, it was “technological advances that made possible the construction of large dams and canals.” They added that “the concept of the multiple‐purpose project” – such as damming a river for hydro development, flood control, and irrigation, for example – “and of the river basin as the meaningful geographic unit for organization was dependent upon the emergence of modern engineering.”33 Armed with this knowledge, to submit to the desert demonstrated weakness and a lack of engineering prowess. To allow Western progress to halt in the face of obstacles both natural and human‐inspired would be to admit that the

29 George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. House of Anansi Press, 1969, 71‐72. 30 David Lowenthal, ‘The Place of the Past in the American Landscape’ in Lowenthal, David and Martyn Bowden, eds. Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honour of John K. Wright. Oxford University Press, 1976, 94. 31 Lowenthal, ‘The Place of the Past in the American Landscape’ (note 30), 102. 32 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 52. 33 Irving Fox and Lyle Craine, quoted in Resources for Tomorrow Conference, Montreal, Quebec. October 23‐28, 1961. Vol. 1 – Conference Background Papers. Queen’s Printer, 1961, 287. - 45 -

course of American history to dominate utterly the entire North American continent – in one way or another – was unachievable, or worse: that American progress could be limited by obstacles created by American progress such as resource scarcity. The desert, the arid plains that Western settlement had halted against, was the most imposing complication for the waves of settlers moving westward. Where mountains could be traversed, plains crossed, and streams waded through, the desert as a destination for homesteading would have been a demoralizing prospect. And this Westward expansion, the most “dominant fact in American life,” had come to a halt at the Pacific coast with the occupation of all available ‘free lands.’ 34 Worster argues that the moment irrigation as a means of ensuring American growth seemed guaranteed at the turn of the twentieth century, the history of factual, objective, verifiable description was substituted for that of the more spacious, intriguing world of myth. The concept of irrigation in the American West cannot be considered completely without this ideological, mythical component, which holds that irrigation will ensure far more than greater crop yields, and embodies the very self‐redemption of humanity.35 Yet the unachievable expectations placed upon this advancement in agriculture, coupled with the national preoccupation with unlimited growth, created a vicious cycle of water dependency. To reach the ultimate goal of unfettered control over North America and its resources, America needed people. To ensure enough food to feed the burgeoning Western (and Eastern) populations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century depended on a stable and large volume of water for irrigation. Large‐scale irrigation could only happen with guidance and finance from Washington and other Eastern businesses, and Washington stood to gain materially and financially from control over an increasingly large expanse of territory. Yet the security of this territory could only be ensured through the securing of increasingly scarce water resources.

34 Tuner, Frontier Thesis (note 4), 55. 35 Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination. Oxford University Press, 1993, 117. - 46 -

2.3 – Water as Resource in the American West It is important to consider how it is that water in its natural, flowing form became commodified, and entered the realm of “resources.” Water, according to Patricia Limerick, was “the key aspect of property in an arid or semiarid region,” the cornerstone upon which the control of most other resources depended. 36 If the stable and abundant supply of animal pelts, minerals, cattle and livestock, timber, and oil was dependent upon an equally secure and stable supply of water, it was a short leap to secure an adequate supply of water by making it property.37 In so doing, it was possible to apply a price tag to a resource indispensible in its own right, and in the creation of so much else of value. Part of this was the realization of the Enlightenment ideal of self‐preservation: the commodification of water went a long way towards securing so much else vital to the survival of the species. Jamie Linton pinpoints 1909 as the date when water was first officially labelled a resource in America by W.J. McGee, a member of the Roosevelt administration responsible for national water issues.38 Yet the nineteenth century was full of small‐ and increasingly large‐scale water diversion advances made with the ultimate goal of commodifying water through the process of acquisition and ownership, and the awarding of exchange value. We have seen this already in the form of prior appropriation, in which water in its natural form was made an extension of the land. Erich Zimmermann goes so far as to argue that the word ‘resource’ itself is merely “an abstraction reflecting human appraisal,” and, as such, a “purely subjective concept.”39 While McGee’s prophesizing about the control of water being necessary to the total conquest of nature taking place in turn‐of‐the‐ century America highlights the fullest extent to which people are capable of commodifying water, Linton’s choice of date seems too rigid.40 However, he also highlights this date because of the advent of hydroelectric development as a critical

36 Limerick, Legacy of Conquest (note 25), 72. 37 Limerick, Legacy of Conquest (note 25), 71‐73. 38 Jamie Linton, ‘The Social Nature of Natural Resources – the Case of Water.’ Reconstruction. Vol. 6, No. 3. Summer 2006. Online Journal. 39 Erich W. Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries: A Functional Appraisal of the Availability of Agricultural and Industrial Materials. Revised Edition. Ha rper & Brothers Publishers, 1951, 3, 7. 40 Linton, Social Nature of Natural Resources (note 38). - 47 -

moment in water’s being made a tradable good.41 Once the prospect of large‐scale damming of rivers took on the added weight of electricity generation, in addition to the benefits of flood control and irrigation, the process of making water marketable was irreversible because the advantages were too great to let waste. And the “hydrosocial” nature of water ensured that any meaning conferred upon it would be the product of human interaction with the now‐resource through mega‐dam construction, the social force of irrigation, and its central role in growth and development. 42 As the twentieth century began, the interest in water diversion as a means of ensuring against ecoscarcity while securing growth and progress was seen less as a possibility, and increasingly as a necessity. To buckle in the face of natural limitations in the desert and its barriers to irrigation would be to stymie the twin pillars of growth and progress inherent in the American imperial project, and admit that the ideals of development had limitations that humanity could not outfox. Taken further, overcoming the desert was in this flurry of commodification seen as logical, or what Andrew Biro argues was seen as the “common sense (or, to put it more pointedly, natural) solution to the problem of (apparently natural) ecoscarcity.”43 Perhaps the twin Enlightenment ideals of emancipation from want and self‐preservation could not be guaranteed in America if the desert was strong enough to halt the American march westward. In many ways, the history of water development in the American West is a story about the domination of nature carried out to ensure the survival of those willing to live in inhospitable environments. The North American Water and Power Alliance, when it arrived on the scene, was nothing more than a continuation of this effort to survive: only the scale and scope had expanded, but the intention was the same. In the late nineteenth century, when efforts at large‐scale water diversion were only just beginning to stabilize, it seemed that the power of modern science and technology to transform the very landscapes in which humanity lives might

41 Linton, Social Nature of Natural Resources (note 38). 42 Linton, Social Nature of Natural Resources (note 38). 43 Andrew Biro, ‘Wet Dreams: Ideology and the Debate over Canadian Water Exports.’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; December, 2002. Vol. 13, No. 4, 38. - 48 -

save Enlightenment ideals from failure or irrelevance. Once emancipation and self‐ realization came to be accepted alongside modern science as enabling the incursion into nature as a means to elevate humanity from the persistent insecurities of scarcity and want, the idea of nature as a supplier of resources invaluable to humanity’s very existence became widespread. Of an earlier time, Harvey argues that “one side effect of 18th Century political economy was that the domination of nature was viewed as a necessary prerequisite to emancipation and self‐realization,” a precursor to the nineteenth and twentieth century domination of nature under discussion here.44 Although Smith referred to this as capitalism’s making of nature “in its totality [an] appendage to the production process itself,” societies began to conceptualize it as a ‘necessary prerequisite’ to self‐realization, rather than a reciprocal relationship with a finite limit of gifts to give. 45 Indeed, for state planners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who followed in the Enlightenment’s wake, “the scientific domination of nature (including human nature) was emancipatory.”46 As populations flourished and expectations grew of that which would constitute ‘the good life,’ reason and rationality began dictating the debate about the domination of nature. In 1893, Ohioan author James Reeve argued that “one who has complete faith in the destiny of our country can only believe that that destiny will be best accomplished by developing to the utmost every material resource as rapidly and fully as it can be done.”47 And as the pace of exploitation quickened, it became irrational to consider a slowing of the process: growth was progress, and progress meant civilization. Science and technology, under the employ of social pressures, had determined an efficient manner in which to extract necessary resources. The question for a new age of scientists, planners, and engineers was how to ensure that nature, a bastion of

44 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishing, 1996, 121‐ 122. Italics added. 45 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. University of Georgia Press, 1984, 71. 46 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 1), 96. 47 James Reeve, quoted in Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 115. - 49 -

irrationality and irregularities, began to behave in a “uniform, legible, manageable, harvestable, and Fordist” manner. 48 2.4 – Humans as Managers of Nature The concept of humans as managers of nature was ordained to continue the mission of ensuring the survival of the species through efficient and rational ordering of nature. The homogenizing pressure of capital accumulation to simplify an ‘irrational’ nature in the nineteenth century ensured that the natural world must provide for the species while ensuring that the simplification of nature remained lucrative.49 “Large‐scale capitalism,” according to Scott, “is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay.”50 William Leiss identifies two problems with this human‐managerialist approach to first nature. In situating humans as managers, the exploitation of nature is not only internalized as the logical progression of instrumental reason and Enlightenment thought, but it has been made irreplaceable to the twin capitalist pillars of the good life (production and consumption). So much so, in fact, that the idea of dominating nature is no longer extractable from that which constitutes the necessities of life.51 “In his activity man changes the natural world” while changing himself, according to Leiss, “opening up new possibilities for utilizing nature’s resources, and the process continues indefinitely.”52 In the West, government efforts at changing the landscape, coupled with parallel advancements in science and technology, allowed for an increasingly dramatic alteration of the natural world as a result of humanity’s labour inputs. Humans changed as a result of their labour because they had to in order to remain solvent. This also allowed for a dramatic shift in how Western Americans perceived themselves: many became more technically minded, and those

48 Arturo Escobar, ‘After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology’ in Current Anthropolog y. Vol. 40, No. 1. February 1999, 7. 49 Escobar, ‘After Nature’ (note 48), 7. 50 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 1), 8. 51 William Leiss, The Domination of Nature. George Braziller, 1972, 83; also see Smith, Uneven Development (note 45), 86. 52 Leiss, Domination of Nature (note 51), 83. - 50 -

agriculturalists who lacked the necessary skills were pushed aside in favour of large, monopoly landholders possessing capital to purchase land, water and technology. Another issue Leiss identified is that in the twentieth century a sufficient level of production and exploitation had already been attained to ensure the needs of Western society were met well before NAWAPA surfaced in 1964.53 In other words, NAWAPA was not guaranteeing the survival of Western Americans, so much as the survival of their extravagancies, because the base needs of society had long been realized. Yet the blind drive towards perpetual growth continued, and continues to this day. If the control over nature necessary to ensure Western well‐ being had already been guaranteed before 1964, what basis existed for the need of perpetual and unlimited growth at all costs that NAWAPA represented?54 Knowing as humanity has for the last century that limitless development can and does possess consequences other than capital gain, and that “unlimited growth is, prima facie, impossible,” what possible motivation for something as ecologically, economically, and politically illogical as NAWAPA existed other than unbridled capitalist gain from natural properties?55 Soper concurs, arguing that fabricated ecological ‘crisis’ stems from the human need for what she refers to as “cultural transcendence,” the urge to “productivity, innovation, [and] the escape from cyclical, reproductive and traditional modes of being.”56 Stability had been achieved, yet growth prospered. “Capitalism, industrialization, Western ‘civilization,’” Soper argues, can all be viewed in the broadest sense as originating from the “modes of satisfaction” intended to achieve “cultural transcendence.”57 Yet the progress inherent in the “transcendent drive of capitalist modernity,” she maintains, is “deeply contradictory,” and rests on “uncivil and ecologically disastrous” habits that those in Western societies continue to ignore at their peril.58

53 Leiss, Domination of Nature (note 51), 153. 54 Simon Dalby, ‘Threats from the South?’ in Deudney, Daniel H., ed. Contested Grounds. State University of New York Press, 1999, 165. 55 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 44), 15. 56 Kate Soper, ‘Representing Nature.’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; December, 1998. Vol. 9, No. 4, 62. 57 Soper, Representing Nature (note 56), 62. 58 Soper, Representing Nature (note 56), 64. - 51 -

Moreover, the paradigm of humans as managers of a docile nature is shifting radically in a warming world. The mere exploitation of nature for its own sake is slowly giving way to a more nuanced approach to environmental resource management, seeking a balance between sustainability and capital accumulation. Yet there is still reason to believe, as Leiss did as far back as 1972, that it is becoming increasingly difficult (or unpopular) for the general public to separate scientific and technological advancements “from the actual institutional network that plans and directs the successive stages of that activity.”59 As a result of decades of socio‐natural reengineering to achieve security and growth, the American public has remained skeptical of the Bureau and Western states when they argued more water was necessary to continue the industrial and irrigational growth necessary for greater human welfare. The mere excuses intended to protect comfortable methods of capital accumulation are gradually being laid bare. But in looking back from the present ecological crisis to the beginning of the twentieth century, it seemed as if the Bureau was set to begin a new phase of water diversion projects in America – a road, it would turn out, that had pitfalls of its own. 2.5 – Failure and Rebirth: Elwood Mead, the Bureau, and the East/West Divide After the Bureau’s founding in 1902, the alliance between water development, power, and profit began to unravel. The support of staunch conservatives in Eastern, urban centres for Western water projects began to demonstrate to an increasingly sceptical public that the accumulation of power and profit was the real driving force behind water diversion schemes intended to supply already powerful men with tools to Figure 2.1 River Discharge in Canada (Source: From W.R. Derrick further ensure stabilized Sewell, "Water Resources Across the American Continent," Geographical Magazine, June 1974, pp. 472479; and data supplied by Inland Waters Directorate, Environment Canada) production and social peace. This

59 Leiss, Domination of Nature (note 51), 171. - 52 -

was particularly true after the First World War ended, and during the Great Depression.60 Numerous efforts by the Bureau to initiate innovative diversion plans met with disaster between 1902 and 1923. By the latter year, four in ten farmers who had begun farming as a result of grants received by the federal government were delinquent on their water‐construction payments, generating $84 million in crop value as opposed to $153 million only three years previously. Roughly $16 million, only 11% of the $143 million spent on federal irrigation efforts to help small‐scale farmers stay in business against the onslaught of agribusiness was repaid to the government.61 In 1923 it appeared to many that the Bureau of Reclamation’s efforts to help kick‐start federally subsidized Western irrigation projects had failed, due in large measure to the short‐sightedness, poor decisions, and unrealistic expectations of those controlling the Bureau. By 1930, according to Worster, “it was so manifest a failure that, had there not been powerful groups and strong cultural imperatives supporting it, federal reclamation would have died an ignominious death.”62 Yet a new age of ambition and a new leader saved the Bureau from itself. Named commissioner by President Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Elwood Mead was more responsible than any other person for restoring the prestige of Western irrigation and diversion projects in America. His success in bringing about the most heroic and impressive engineering feat in the United States at the time in completing the Hoover Dam in 1936, and his subsequent efforts at underwriting the remaking of the waterways of the American West with hydroelectricity dollars helped Americans to think positively about water diversion once again. Marq de Villiers argues that the completion of the Hoover Dam sparked a torrent of other large‐scale dam constructions around the world, most notably in the USSR, China, and across Africa. Setting in motion a “change in the character of the world’s waterways, permanently altering the ecosystems of entire drainage basins,” the Hoover Dam’s completion

60 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 166‐167. 61 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 178. 62 Worster, Rivers of Empire (note 2), 169‐170. - 53 -

began a new global age of large‐scale water diversion projects.63 As de Villiers indicates, “the numbers are startling”: there were no dams larger than 15 metres anywhere in the world by 1900, and in 1950 the number had reached 5,270 – by 1980, there were 36, 562 such dams world‐wide, over half of them in China alone.64 Under Mead, the era after 1924 became, as Robert Glennon argues, the “heyday of dam‐building” in the United States, when “engineers, with considerable bravado and technological wizardry, dammed the most formidable and wildest rivers in North America.”65 More importantly, Mead made it acceptable, even practical, for Americans to think big again in relation to water development plans after years of Bureau mediocrity and failure. A strange irony of water development in the American West is that it was entirely an Eastern project: both the Bureau and the Corps were branches of the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, and the increasingly vast sums of money needed to carry out these Western water plans were bankrolled by Eastern governments and businesses. This fact was apparent to Turner himself, writing in 1896 that “the West has been built up with borrowed capital.”66 What frustrated Western irrigators, according to Samuel Hays, were the interventions they sought to ensure that water projects were initiated, yet came replete with complications and controls beyond their ability to resist.67 Without the East – Eastern government, Eastern financing – there could have been no West, a fact difficult to accept, yet impossible to ignore in the West. The differences in perception between East and West go deeper than financing, striking at the heart of what makes Western impressions of survival and prosperity bound to the land and its resources. “Lack of water is the central fact of existence” in the West, according to Marc Reisner, “and a

63 Marq de Villiers, Water. Stoddart Publishing, 1999, 145. 64 de Villiers, Water (note 63), 146. 65 Glennon, Water Follies (note 28), 20. 66 Tuner, Frontier Thesis (note 4), 56. 67 Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 18901920. Harvard University Press, 1959, 241. - 54 -

whole culture and set of values have grown up around it,” values that Eastern residents could simply not grasp. 68 One of the common threads that wove together the arguments in favour of NAWAPA were the twin concepts of “unused” and “wasted” water, an idea that found expression in every discussion about the benefits of the Alliance. The argument was that any freshwater flowing into the sea as opposed to being harnessed for hydroelectric power or consumed for agricultural or municipal uses was not being used as efficiently or rationally as possible. It was, without human intervention to regulate usage, being wasted. Figure 2.1 provides some indication of where the myth of “wasted” water emerged: the largest rivers in Canada drain outwards to the Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific oceans, in addition to Hudson Bay, rather than southward to the United States, with the exception of the Columbia, though it too ultimately finds its way to the Pacific. In one typical example found in the November 1965 issue of Public Utilities Fortnightly, Edmour Germain claimed that “the general idea behind NAWAPA is to make maximum utilization of the now unused water, or water likely to remain unused over the foreseeable future, by employing it in a manner to bring fuller life to the peoples of the entire North American continent.”69 In strikingly similar language, the U.S. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development (WWD) also indicated that “the [NAWAPA] proposal is predicated on the utilization of only that water which now, or in the foreseeable future, is going unused.”70 Such a misunderstanding was argued in multiple venues by advocates of the NAWAPA plan, each attempting to situate the water under scrutiny as valueless without some manner of human valuation to give it meaning. Some American commentators, such as Gordon Eliot White of the Austin, Texas journal American Statesman, argued that hostility in Canada towards Sen. Moss had been elevated because the waste he spoke of was accurate. “At least four billion acre feet of water

68 Marc Reisner. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Viking Press, 1986, 12. 69 Public Utilities Fortnightly. Importing Water from Canada. November 11, 1965, 30. 70 United States Senate. Committee on Public Works. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development. A Summary of Water Resource Projects, Plans, and Studies Relating to the Western and Midwestern United States. Government Printing Office, 1966, 13. - 55 -

run uselessly into the sea” according to White, a figure never sourced.71 Canadians, in this sense, were hesitant either because their waste of freshwater was true, or by virtue of their ignorance of water resource availability and needs within Canada. Regional variations on the theme of “waste” are interesting to consider here: in Cadillac Desert, Reisner argues that “in the East, to ‘waste’ water is to consume it needlessly or excessively. In the West, to waste water is not to consume it – to let it flow unimpeded and undiverted down rivers.”72 Without human intervention to associate “unused” water with value, water as a resource would cease to be a resource, resigned to remain simply part of the natural world. U.S. President Herbert Hoover echoed this predominantly Eastern sentiment in 1926, claiming that “true conservation of water is not the prevention of its use. Every drop of water that runs to the sea without yielding its full commercial returns to the nation is an economic waste.”73 But this accounts solely for economic uses. As such, it is incomplete as a method for thinking about the full uses of river systems and watersheds from the perspective of those who seek the inclusion of non‐ economic factors in the valuation of natural systems. Regarding water export, Rorke Bryan argues that “the conservationist’s role is not to stop water transfer but to ensure that its necessity is objectively examined, that all options have been heard, and that all social and monetary costs considered.” This is the tempered approach to conservation missing from East/West characterizations. The variation in thinking about how and why water is consumed is crucial to understanding how differing perceptions of reality can impact resource use. Arne Naess introduces the obvious, but often neglected relationship between ontology and ethics, arguing that “the difference between the antagonists [regarding environmental intervention] is one…of ontology than of ethics. They may have fundamental ethical prescriptions in common, but apply them differently because they see and experience reality so differently.”74

71 American Statesman. Experts Eye Water in North. October 3, 1966. 72 Reisner, Cadillac Desert (note 68), 12. 73 President Herbert Hoover, quoted in Glennon, Water Follies (note 28), 13. 74 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1991, 66. Italics original. - 56 -

In the case of NAWAPA, it is clear that when considering the antagonists (state planners, politicians, and engineers on the hand and ecologists, politicians, and many members of the academic and scientific communities on the other) that there is no way of convincing a state planner or engineer to save a watershed or river from being dammed so long as they retain their conception of the river as merely water. The task of dissuading them becomes more challenging if they view this river in terms of its potential energy being wasted without human intervention. Discussing the “land ethic” of Aldo Leopold, Tina Loo maintains that “thinking in ecological terms revealed the poverty of a conservation system ‘based wholly on economic motives.’”75 Finally, we must remember that those both for and against NAWAPA had human welfare at least as their common ethical foundation: their ontologies differed inasmuch as they held competing conceptions of what they felt the best means were to that end. 2.6 – Setting the Stage for NAWAPA: The Columbia River Treaty The controversy surrounding the Columbia River Treaty is a fundamental context through which to understand the anxiety already present in Canadian society before the North American Water and Power Alliance became known. Some commentators draw more direct connections between the two events than others, though it is undeniable that NAWAPA followed immediately Figure 2.2 Columbia River Plan (Source: 'The Proposed Columbia River Treaty' on the heels of the by A.G.L. McNaughton in International Journal, Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1963) Columbia River Treaty’s ratification and sought to expand upon treaty details

75 Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. UBC Press, 2006, 156. - 57 -

pertaining to water diversion and export already agreed to in the document. If nothing else, the Columbia Treaty was responsible for removing the constitutional barrier to the promotion of subsequent large‐scale water export proposals, but also for introducing the concept of Canadian water export as something achievable in American eyes, and as something to be avoided in Canada. 76 Whether intentional or not, the Columbia Treaty set in place a precedent between the governments of the United States and Canada, whereby the former had justifiable reason to suspect that the latter could be persuaded, or might even willingly enter into discussions about large‐scale water export. As such, the Columbia Treaty was one of the first overtures to the idea of “continental resources” in North America ever made. The Columbia River Treaty also succeeded in securing the acceptance of “continental resources” as an avenue of resource extraction in need of further study. What the Treaty showed, if nothing else, was the sheer possibility of similar proposals being discussed: perhaps bigger, grander plans could become feasible, even logical, given the right persuasion. As General Andrew McNaughton, an engineer, former Canadian Ambassador to the United States, and head of the Canadian contingent to the International Joint Commission (IJC) argued in 1963, “the U.S. intention is…to create an inducement to draw Canada…into an integration arrangement which would be primarily of advantage to the United States.”77 Research into the potential of the Columbia River for damming had begun nearly two decades before the treaty was ratified in 1964, involving both Ottawa and Washington, in addition to the British Columbia provincial government under Premier W.A.C. Bennett, the U.S. Congress, and the Army Corps of Engineers. What was so remarkable about the Columbia River, according to Philip Sykes, was the manner in which it flowed from the interior mountains to the sea: a 2,652 foot drop which made it not only one of the greatest potential sources of both consumptive water and hydroelectricity output in North America, but also “an engineer’s

76 Philip Sykes, Sellout: The Giveaway of Canada’s Energy Resources. Hurtig Publishers, 1973, 65. 77 Gen. A.G.L. McN aughton, ‘The Proposed Columbia River Treaty’ in International Journal; Vol. 18, No. 2. Spring 1963, 158. - 58 -

dream.”78 A more detailed understanding of the physical scope and relations of the plan is evident in Figure 2.2. At root, the Treaty was a $410.6 million plan to dam the Columbia River. For Canada, the plan was to build three dams on Canadian soil capable of storing upwards of 15.5 million acre‐feet, backing over 40 miles from the border into Canada and stretching into the Rocky Mountain trench.79 While administration for the project would remain in American hands, the issue of any international wrangling over treaty minutiae was bypassed by the Canadian acquiescence of power to “international control,” control based on what Larratt Higgins, an Ontario Hydro economist and one of General McNaughton’s closest confidants during the Columbia debate, refers to as “the greatest good for the basin as a whole.”80 Political problems began over the controversial construction of the Libby Dam in Montana in 1948, which would have be responsible for flooding over 17,000 acres of British Columbia land to a depth of 150 feet.81 After the plan received Congressional approval in 1950, it was sent to the IJC for consideration in 1951 while Corps engineers began the laborious process of land surveying. Pressure from the United States on Canada to accept the plan without adequate knowledge of existing Canadian water resources, let alone any detailed projections of future Canadian water needs, ensured that Canada was gambling on the future economic prosperity of British Columbia, in addition to accepting American expertise despite the imbalance in acquired knowledge.82 As the IJC considered the treaty, the poor economics of the plan became known to the public. The Libby Dam struck many North Americans as little more than empire or legacy building on the part of the Corps, while others objected to the competitive uses for those rivers and lands for wildlife, recreational, and agricultural purposes.83 As opposition to the dam grew,

78 Sykes, Sellout (note 76), 50. 79 Richard Bocking, Canada's Water: For Sale? James Lewis & Samuel Publishing, 1972, 90, 91. 80 Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources’ (note 5), 224, 225. 81 Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources’ (note 5), 230. 82 See Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources’ (note 5), 228, 229; McNaughton, ‘The Proposed Columbia River Treaty’ (note 77), 155; and Sykes, Sellout (note 76), 49. 83 Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources’ (note 5), 231; and McNaughton, ‘The Proposed Columbia River Treaty’ (note 77), 150. - 59 -

Washington was persuaded to abandon Libby in favour of smaller‐scale alternatives. W.A.C. Bennett was conscious of the short‐term financial compensation to be gained by the province and sacrificed Canadian interests in the Columbia Treaty by vetoing Ottawa’s alternative proposal in favour of the Libby Dam. He chose what Richard Bocking refers to as “operational co‐operation,” which he maintains is tantamount to “the US stating how much water it wants to cross the border in the Columbia river at a given time, and the Canadian authorities turn[ing] the tap accordingly.”84 Rather than continue negotiations with Washington and Victoria, Ottawa opted instead to accept Bennett’s veto and a Columbia plan which included the construction of the 422 foot Libby Dam.85 Federal politicians astonished their American counterparts by acquiescing to Bennett’s proposal without comment, thus ensuring that the short‐term financial gain of British Columbia would win out over the long‐term financial, ecological, agricultural, or recreational interests of the province or the country as a whole. In the wake of the Columbia debacle, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker solidified the weakened bargaining position of the federal government by putting forth a view on federal‐provincial relations that claimed that in any international dealing where provincial jurisdiction was concerned, it would be the responsibility of the federal government to ensure all international protocol was observed while blindly deferring to the wishes of the province(s).86 It was an act that, according to Higgins, “would destroy the credibility, relevance, and consequently the power of the Ottawa government,” a view which, despite its strength, has been partially substantiated by the continued failure of the Canadian federal government to formalize a coherent national policy with the provinces regarding shared water resources.87 Attempting to put a monetary value on Canadian gains and losses as a result of the Columbia Treaty, Sykes tabulated the financial gains to Canada at roughly $455 million when considering flood control, access to American markets, interest

84 Bocking, Canada’s Water (note 79), 42; J.S. Cram, Water: Canadian Needs and Resources. Harvest House, 1971, 140. 85 Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources’ (note 5), 233. 86 Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources’ (note 5), 234. 87 Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources’ (note 5), 234. - 60 -

payments, and some power generation. With regards to total Canadian losses as a result of the Columbia Treaty, Sykes acknowledges the futility of his effort. The results were staggering: Canada lost control of the Columbia and Kootenay River flows and the untold profits to be made by potential growth and development, 40,000 square miles to inland flooding, billions in consumptive uses never to be recuperated, and the humiliating realization that Canada could never again utilize the optimal flows of the Columbia and Kootenay rivers without incurring financial penalty from the United States. Sykes admits that “these items add up to a total that has never been and perhaps never can be computed.”88 For Frank Quinn, the impact of the Columbia Treaty was pronounced in its “economic” and “psychological effects regionally and nationally.”89 Though the Columbia River Treaty had little to do with water transfer, it set off alarms in the Canadian consciousness with regards to water export, and the extent of the American demands and their efforts to secure them.90 The Calgary Herald on October 4, 1965, maintained that “the lack of formally enunciated Canadian policy on water is encouraging U.S. interests to press for adoption of a vast scheme to divert Canadian water.”91 The Herald and others were drawing a direct link between Ottawa’s uncertainty over Canadian water resources and the ability of the United States to exploit this to their gain. In this sense, they are reinforcing the centrality of resources to the relationship between Canada and the United States. It also highlighted the sheer necessity of federal‐provincial co‐operation on matters of water resources to ensure that competing designs upon Canadian water resources could be met with compromise, rather than domestic wrangling. The Columbia Treaty “not only weakened the position of Canada in future dealings with the United States, it also managed to weaken the position of the federal government vis‐à‐vis

88 Sykes, Sellout (note 76), 61. 89 Frank J. Quinn. Ministry of the Environment. Inland Waters Directorate. Water Planning and Management Branch. AreaofOrigin Protectionism in Western Waters. Queen’s Printer, 1973, 27. 90 Rorke Bryan, Much is Taken, Much Remains: Canadian Issues in Environmental Conservation. Duxbury Pre ss, 197 3, 121. 91 Calgary Herald. October 4, 1965. - 61 -

the provinces.”92 After all the hallmarks of uncertain resource management present in the Columbia negotiations, the situation in Canada was anything but ripe for the scale of water diversion that the Ralph Parsons Company was proposing with NAWAPA. 93 It was bold, even callous to release the continental plan with its dramatic implications for Canadian freshwater and sovereignty so soon after the Columbia Treaty’s conclusion. Other high‐ranking American politicians were also quick to make the connection between Columbia and larger cross‐border water diversions. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, a Westerner himself, recommended in 1964 that Canada and the United States create a series of common, continental resource markets to achieve the greatest efficiency at the lowest cost. Udall identified the Columbia River Treaty as an example of how such an arrangement might look.94 Utah Senator Frank Moss became NAWAPA’s most avid supporter, rallying support for the Alliance at speaking engagements in both countries. He also headed the U.S. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development in 1966, which endorsed NAWAPA as the most practical way to ensure water security for the foreseeable future in the American West.95 Yet the scepticism over the nobility of American intentions towards Canadian freshwater had taken root. Donald Waterfield, in Continental Waterboy, states the connection between the finalizing of the Columbia Treaty and the advent of NAWAPA in the clearest terms: It is no coincidence that NAWAPA’s predatory intentions were not published before May, 1964. There were already plans on the American drawing boards for watering the United States with northern streams before acceptance [of the Columbia Treaty] by Canada; but no engineering firm had had the temerity to publish such schemes.”96

92 James Laxer. The Energy Poker Game: The Politics of the Continental Resource Deal, New Press, 1970, 40. 93 Sykes, Sellout (note 76), 63. 94 United States Department of the Interior Press Release, quoted in J.S. Cram, Water: Canadian Needs and Resources (note 84), 136. 95 United States Senate, A Summary of Water Resource Projects (note 70). 96 Donald Waterfield, Continental Waterboy: The Columbia River Controversy. Clarke, Irwin and Company Limited, 1970, 214. - 62 -

Waterfield immediately adds that “it was then entirely logical to assume that, if Canadians were willing to give the Americans Kootenay’s water, they would surely be even more keen to sell flows from other rivers.”97 Larratt Higgins notoriously claimed – conservatively, it turns out – that “it will cost Canada about $100 million to give the Columbia away.”98 The precedent had been set with America that Canadian water, for all the nationalist rhetoric to the contrary, might be for sale after all.

97 Waterfield, Continental Waterboy (note 96), 214. 98 Higgins, ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources’ (note 5), 236. - 63 -

Chapter Three – The State and Social Conceptions of Nature

“We behave as though we were in a desperate war for survival, and we are, but our only enemy is our own unwillingness to adapt our pattern of living to the shape of our environment.” – Raymond Dasmann, ‘Man in North America’

NAWAPA was a private sector plan, but one espoused largely by those in government, such as Senator Frank Moss, who would have been responsible for implementing the proposal had it been accepted. Thus, it is necessary to turn now to the state as an active agent in the transformation of the North American environment. The manner in which high modernist planning shaped the state’s relationship to both people and natural attributes will be examined in two ways: through the processes of rendering water technical, and the means by which the state used control over nature to regulate its citizens. And while the populations and the environment, the twin targets of high modernist planning, are often discussed as separate entities, this has not always been the case. For Alvin Hamilton, Canadian Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources (NANR) from 1957 to 1960, it was the responsibility of a “strong political state” to manage national development of natural resources within a loosely defined framework of “human betterment,” an equation Hamilton felt would ultimately lead to “equitable social justice” for all Canadians.1 These issues are explored here first through a broader discussion of high modernism in the mid‐twentieth century in relation to the early twentieth century conservation movement in the United States. Secondly, high modernism will be examined through Canadian Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s “Northern Vision” of resource and human development in the Arctic, a national policy first articulated in the late 1950s. Water did not fit easily into resource debates in the 1950s and 1960s. Its fundamental importance in maintaining human and other biological life set it apart from comparable resource commodities such as oil or natural gas, yet it retained enough similar properties to be considered a marketable good. Water’s central place in the Canadian imagination and its constant labelling as a point of national heritage

1 Alvin Hamilton, unpublished ‘Declaration of Principles by the Progressive Conservative National Convention,” quoted in Patrick Kyba, Alvin: A Biography of the Honourable Alvin Hamilton, P.C. Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, 1989, 102. - 64 -

ensured that in any debate about water diversion or withdrawal, whether for domestic or international use, the stakes would be higher than for other resources. After Hamilton, subsequent NANR ministers in Canada connected water (and resources more broadly) to the future vitality of the country, but also to natural and political legacies. When convincing John Diefenbaker to make his vision of resource development a central pillar in the 1957 election campaign, Alvin Hamilton drew upon the advice of his close friend Dr. Merril Menzies, arguing that “only by great thought and effort can we prevent the unconscious betrayal of the national heritage bequeathed to us by Sir John A. Macdonald.”2 Hamilton’s eventual successor at NANR, Liberal Arthur Laing, positioned the wise management of water resources in Canada as central to the strength or weakness of the Canadian nation, and as the linchpin of the “prosperity or the adversity of all our generations.”3 Such positing of water as the ‘ultimate resource’ upon which Canada’s future hinged made it increasingly difficult to consider water diversion using reason before passion. It was easy to preach about the vital importance of water to Canada’s future development, and even easier to speculate about the worth of water to the United States and the extents some would go to in that country to secure access to Canadian water. Saskatchewan MP Tommy Douglas touched on both points on May 4, 1964, arguing in the House of Commons that “we have great resources of water, more water than our friends to the south, and that is why our friends to the south would be very happy to spend a few billion dollars in Canada if they could get access to our water resources.”4 These and other statements on the centrality of water to Canada’s great future indicate the significance which the American and Canadian states ascribed to water and other resource development, and the often emotional attitudes brought to bear on the decision‐making process. Among the many mid‐

2 Dr. Merill Menzies, personal letter to Dr. Glen Green, quoted in Kyba, Alvin (note 1), 102. 3 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, C.O.P. CA.R. 64, “Water ‐ The Ultimate Resource: An Address by the Honourable Arthur Laing, Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources, at a luncheon of the Pacific Northwest Trade Ass ociation, Portland, Oregon, April 12, 1965.” Ottawa, 1965, 12. 4 Thomas C. Douglas, “Canadian Water Resources.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 26th Parliament. 2nd Session. Vol. III (May 4, 1964). Canadian Government Publishing, 1964, 2905. - 65 -

century debates in Canada over resource use and energy policy, none possessed higher stakes than NAWAPA. 3.1 – Problems with Unchecked Development, Growth, and Northern Lifestyles Problematizing the idea that the desert must be made to bloom only became fashionable in North America over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Until then, it was assumed by many that unchecked development and growth in sustaining Northern lifestyles was the proper, even divinely sanctioned task of humanity. And when the landscape proved inhospitable to the greater ambitions of society as it did in the American Southwest, there was a “greater willingness [on the part of Americans] to shape the land to suit their enterprise than to adapt their enterprise to the shape of the land.”5 NAWAPA, in this sense, would have continued the theme of unchecked growth prevalent in North American society that sought to remake nature as needs arose. David Harvey argued in 1996 that “from a green perspective, continuous growth cannot be achieved by overcoming what appear to be temporary limits – such as those imposed by a lack of technological sophistication,” adding that “continuous and unlimited growth is prima facie impossible.”6 Yet it is not enough to simply ask why Northern society has chosen to do this; rather, it will be useful to examine the ways in which NAWAPA may be used as an illustration of the distance that humanity is prepared to go in securing the ultimate necessity of organic life.7 The historical precedent of socio‐natural re‐engineering indicated a future in which gains could be had through a manipulation of the surrounding landscape. Rorke Bryan argues that “the development which has taken place [in the West] was made possible by the creation of extensive water control and diversion measures,” a process which would only improve with advancements in the technological means to both control and divert water.8 Throughout the NAWAPA debate there was never

5 Raymond Dasmann, ‘Man in North America,’ quoted in The Conservation Foundation. Darling, F. Fraser and John P. Milton, eds. Future Environments of North America. The Natural History Press, 1965, 329. 6 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishing, 1996, 15. 7 Dasmann, ‘Man in North America’ (note 5), 329. 8 Rorke Bryan, Much is Taken, Much Remains: Canadian Issues in Environmental Conservation. Duxbury Press, 1973, 138. - 66 -

significant consideration of the alternatives to unchecked growth: how balanced the debate could have been without questioning the manner in which society was progressing along the path of development, let alone whether growth at any cost was the correct path, will be examined here. Even Senator Frank Moss was quick to indicate that it was the twin demands of population growth and expanding industrial development in the American Southwest that were pressuring planners, engineers, and politicians to seek out comfortable solutions to nagging modern problems like ecoscarcity.9 His focus was “resolutely on the supply side of the equation, with demand presumed to be inexorably rising” because of these twin burdens.10 Moss was never unaware that the cruxes of the water scarcity debate were the demands placed upon water by industry and the need to feed growing populations: he maintained, however, that conservation or radical shifts in values and consumption patterns would never equal in magnitude the scale of the problem – that conservation would pale in comparison to the monumental task at hand.11 The perceived magnitude of the water problem in the arid Southwest gave opportunity for those who chose to accept the basic tenets of the crisis to plan for something both grandiose and visionary, something that water conservation – for the planners, politicians, and engineers who envisioned NAWAPA into existence – could never be. Tied to the allure of grandiose and visionary planning was overcoming what Democratic Congressman Jim Wright of Texas saw as the “disturbing indications” in the 1950s and 1960s that America “may have lost some of our capacity for dreaming and acting in those areas concerning our survival upon this Earth” with respect to the “wanton wastefulness in the matter of water.”12 Wright was drawing upon the American historical legacy of innovation and determinism in arguing for the Alliance as a means to re‐imagine the nation on a grand scale while solving the problem of

9 Frank Moss, quoted in Royal Society of Canada. Dolman, Claude E., ed. Water Resources of Canada. Symposia Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966. University of Toronto Press, 1967, 4. 10 Andrew Biro, ‘Wet Dreams: Ideology and the Debate over Canadian Water Exports.’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; December, 2002. Vol. 13, No. 4, 33. 11 Frank E. Moss, The Water Crisis. Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1967, 277‐278. 12 Jim Wright, The Coming Water Famine. Coward‐McCann Inc., 1963, 221‐222. - 67 -

America’s “wanton wastefulness of water” without suggesting that people consume less water or change their lifestyles. Moss, Wright, and others like them, such as Brigadier‐General James Kelly of the Army Corps of Engineers, were responding to a calamity of America’s own making without ever considering the ways in which American progress had crafted a truly American crisis. What’s more, mega‐diversion boosters in the United States responded with the same enthusiasm mustered only previously in times of war. The analogies were not hard to make: for Congressman Wright, “the crisis of our diminishing water resources is just as severe…as any wartime crisis we have ever faced. Our survival is just as much at stake as it was at the time of Pearl Harbor, or the Argonne, or Gettysburg.”13 Admonishing Americans who did not demonstrate the requisite “fortitude,” “diligence,” and “bold and imaginative thinking” that had seen previous generations of Americans through equally grave situations, Wright and his contemporaries were not only drawing upon America’s history of fortitude and frontier individualism to solve problems, but were actively campaigning for the same largeness of vision which had built America to solve the environmental problems that such visionary thinking had wrought.14 At the 1969 Arid Lands in Perspective conference, P.H. McGauhey claimed that agricultural productivity and the “desire of people to enjoy the climate of the Southwest” were the real justifications for water transfer proposals, yet these sounded hollow in comparison to statements which played upon the romanticism of the West, of the future, and of the unknown North.15 Newsweek reported in February 1965 that “obviously the alternative [to water shortages] is to bring in new water from somewhere else, and for years, planners have been looking longingly at the rivers of the far north.” The story quoted the associate director of the Water Resources Institute at the University of Nevada, who claimed that “something like

13 Wright, Coming Water Famine (note 12), 231. 14 Wright, Coming Water Famine (note 12), 231. 15 P.H. McGauhey, quoted in American Association for the Advancement of Science. McGinnies, William G. and Bram J. Goldman, eds. Arid Lands in Perspective: Including AAS Papers on Water Importation Into Arid Lands. University of Arizona Press, 1969, 363. - 68 -

[NAWAPA] will have to be the ultimate solution to our problems for the next couple of hundred years.”16 Such was the stuff upon which national visions could be built, on which nations could be mobilized as they had been in times of war – only now, the enemy was an irrational nature whose dropping output could only be saved by technology. Such musings lifted the spirit and reinforced the strength of human ingenuity and agency, convincing a troubled nation that despite its problems, this was something that technology could fix, if given the chance. But the real problem, according to some, was that growth was occurring in inappropriate locations in the United States and Canada, and that this demographic pattern must be shifted or survival would be threatened. Statements such as that made by staff ecologist Raymond Dasmann of the Conservation Foundation found little support within the halls of power. He wrote in 1965 that

the search for water is endless, since people are encouraged to settle in greatest numbers in the more arid regions…we propose to dam and capture every river, move water any distance without much regard for cost in dollars or damage to the natural environment… We behave as though we were in a desperate war for survival… but our only enemy is our own unwillingness to adapt our pattern of living to the shape of our environment.17

One of the key challenges faced by those who opposed the unquestioned value of development and unchecked economic growth was the need to transcend mere moralizing. Any challenge upon the hegemonic status quo with subjective arguments about the needs and values of nature – regardless of the subjectivity of economic growth – would inevitably fall short of expectations. Without the backing of scientific rationality, Dasmann’s argument would sound hollow because of the stock placed in rational understandings of natural systems and the traditional framework for conceiving of nature as “an inexhaustible cornucopia” or “an

16 Newsweek. NAWAPA: Watering a Continent. February 22, 1965. 17 Dasmann, ‘Man in North America’ (note 5), 331. Italics added. - 69 -

unlimited bounty awaiting…the ‘hand of man’ to turn it into a bundle of resources.”18 It was only with the use of “scientific eco‐networks” that arguments against the despoilation of nature could help relieve the “burden of moral justification” and make the impalpable seem palpable, “the ambivalent unequivocal, [and] the groundless susceptible of proof.”19 By employing science, so long a tool of the state used to justify its interventions into first nature, as a means of quantifiably measuring natural degradation resulting from such interventions, the debate was turned on its head: no longer could boosters of economic growth argue against their opponents armed solely with precedence and history. In the future, stronger arguments would be needed to maintain an unsustainable status quo that NAWAPA’s proponents were defending. It is important to consider what the actual extent of the water shortage was in the Southwest at the time, and the accuracy of water needs projections. While it gradually came to be accepted by most that the future shortage was not of freshwater, but of historically cheap freshwater, the crisis, however dubious in hindsight, was very real to men of influence in the 1960s. In 1973 at the Canadian Water Resources Association conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Brigadier‐General Kelly cited a

Figure 3.1 Breakdown of 1960 water report issued by the National Water Commission withdrawal (Source: USGS Water Survey 1960) (NWC) on population growth and America’s future. In its report, the NWC claimed that even with low population and low economic growth levels the United States water requirements would double between 1960 and 2000, a claim that was partly substantiated by the new millennium. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) water survey’s for 1960 and 2000, total U.S. water withdrawals in 1960 for all purposes totaled 270 billion gallons per day

18 E.F. Murphy, Governing Nature. Quadrangle Books, 1967, 20; also see Cindi Katz, ‘Whose Nature, Whose Culture? Private Productions of Space and the “Preservation” of Nature’ in Braun, Bruce and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. Routledge, 1998, 46. 19 Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk. Polity Press, 1995, 55. - 70 -

(Bgal/d), a figure which increased to 408 Bgal/d in the USGS 2000 report, a growth rate of 1.51, below the NWC projected rate of 2.20 During that same forty year period, the U.S. population grew by 100 million, a comparable growth rate of 1.55.21 Of particular interest from the data are the illustrations drawn which highlight the remarkable difference between the Eastern United States and the Western United States regarding water withdrawal. As shown in Figure 3.1, irrigation comprised 40% of water withdrawal in the 1960 USGS Water Survey, dropping to 34% of water withdrawal by the 2000 USGS Water Survey, though it failed to lose its most telling geographic feature. Figure 3.2 from the 2000 USGS survey, illustrates a country highly divided between East and West with respect to irrigation withdrawals: of the 20 states that withdraw anywhere from 1,000 to Figure 3.2 Total U.S. Withdrawals by State Irrigation 2000 (Source: USGS 31,000 millions of gallons Water Survey 2000) per day (Mgal/d), 14 are western states, including the two leading culprits, Idaho and California, who are the only states to withdraw between 15,000 to 31,000 Mgal/d. The only Eastern state that withdraws water at the higher end of the scale is Arkansas, withdrawing between 5,000 and 15,000 Mgal/d.22

20 Of this 408 Bgal/d, 85% (346.8 Bgal/d) was freshwater withdrawal, 15% (61.2 Bgal/d) saline. For data on water withdrawal patterns and figures, see United States Geological Survey. MacKichan, K.A. and J.C. Kammerer, eds. Circular 456. Estimated Use of Water in the United States, 1960. U.S. Department of the Interior, 1961; and United States Geological Survey. Hutson, Susan S., Nancy L. Barber, Joan F. Kenny, Kristin S. Linsey, Deborah S. Lumia, and Molly A. Maupin, eds. Circular 1268. Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000. U.S. Department of the Interior, 2004. 21 For data on the April, 2000 census, see United States Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for the United States, Regions, States, and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2008, http://www.census.gov/popest/states/tables/NST‐EST2008‐01.xls; for data on the July, 1960 census see United States Census Bureau. Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for the United States, Regions, States, and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2008, http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/popclockest.txt 22 USGS 2000 Water Survey (note 20). - 71 -

Statistics on American irrigation withdrawals can be used to highlight the ways in which the legacies of irrigation, growth, and development through water diversion are still dominant features of the landscape of contemporary America. Writing in 1963 for Resources for the Future Inc., Hans Landsberg argued that “demands upon the nation’s resources of fresh water are expected to multiply between 1960 and the year 2000.”23 He notes that “part of the increase will come about simply from increases in population and in industrial activity,” in addition to the continued urbanization occurring in the arid Southwest, adding a twist to what I have highlighted as the twin cruxes of the water scarcity debate in North America.24 The success of NAWAPA in moving from the drafting table to the public domain reflects the emphasis that those in power placed upon economic growth as the primary ambition of society, an attitude that Richard Bocking was quick to distance himself from at the 1973 CWRA conference. Attempting to answer whether large‐scale water development was vital to the success of Northern civilization, Bocking echoed Ted Newbury’s sentiment from earlier in the conference that its vitality largely depends on the kind of society or nation that people desire, and the values that become part of that society or nation.25 We cannot ignore what Naess referred to as the prestige of consumption and waste in North American societies, so entrenched and married to the notion of scientific advancement that any effort to curb this enthusiasm for progress and development would not only seem illogical, but would contradict American progress and ideals.26 “Deep faith in economic growth is a fundamental part of the American tradition,” argued David Anderson in 1970, noting that “to question it is to threaten the American dream itself.”27 Yet then, as now, it rarely seems to have been considered that “it might have been more logical, cheaper, and ultimately more beneficial to encourage population growth in

23 Hans Landsberg, Leonard L. Fischman, and Joseph L. Fisher, eds. Resources in America’s Future: Patterns of Requirements and Availabilities 19602000. Resources for the Future Inc. Johns Hopkins Press, 1963, 275. 24 Landsberg, Resources in America’s Future (note 23), 276. 25 Richard Bocking, quoted in Canadian Water Resources Association. 25th Anniversary Conference. CWRA, 1973, 113. 26 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1991, 31. 27 Wall Street Journal. Policy Riddle: Ecology vs. the Economy. February 2, 1970. - 72 -

areas of abundant rather than deficient water” supply.28 The Alliance, therefore, must be seen as an extension of the capitalist effort at modifying the landscape in pursuit of preserving Northern lifestyles. It speaks to the entrenched value of waste and consumption and stands today as a stark reminder of the lengths that many in North America were willing to go to ensure the temporary continuation of an unsustainable status quo. 3.2 – High Modernism and the Conservation Movement As the Bureau of Reclamation was finding its efforts at water diversion increasingly difficult to get started successfully at the turn of the century, the conservation movement was gaining public support. Despite its name, the conservation movement in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century embodied several key aspects of James Scott’s theory of high modernist state planning. Specifically, it was a movement largely organized by scientists and state planners to use nature efficiently for the benefit of government and business on a grand scale. As a result, it sought to remake rather than conserve the natural world, based on technological rather than ecological thinking.29 It is not surprising, then, as Donald Worster argues, that the pursuit of technological dominance over nature and the efficient rationalization of Western rivers and entire watersheds was organized under the engineer’s conservationist rubric.30 Jamie Linton concurs, noting that “determining which...uses water should be applied to…was what ‘conserving’ the resource was all about.”31 Conservation in the Western American context would logically entail the efficient and rational utilization of all available water resources, once water had been successfully conceptualized that way. Indeed, Linton even goes so far as to argue that “the deliberate naming of water as a resource…needs to be seen in the context of scientific, economic and political

28 Bryan, Much is Taken, Much Remains (note 8), 148. 29 Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination. Oxford University Press, 1993, 131. 30 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Oxford University Press, 1985, 154‐155. 31 Jamie Linton, ‘The Social Nature of Natural Resources – the Case of Water.’ Reconstruction. Vol. 6, No. 3. Summer 2006. Online Journal. . - 73 -

circumstances that comprise the conservation movement in the United States.”32 The similarities between the conservation movement and high modernism help bridge the time gap between them: despite their seemingly different ambitions and the eras in which they prospered, the two share much in common. The conservation movement arrived in the wake of advancements in scientific and technological capabilities. Nature came to be understood in the context of scientific rationality, where obstacles, defects, and wastes were known and accounted for. Following on the heels of the conservation era was a concept Worster terms ‘new ecology,’ a refurbished conception of ecological thinking fully in place by the 1950s. It built upon earlier conservationist thought by viewing nature as best conceived in terms of “systems” that functioned by rational, economic logic. This new notion of ecology fit well with the mid‐twentieth century conception of nature’s economy as “one in which resources were the only limits on growth and where growth that reached the limits of available resources was normal and good.”33 Where the conservation movement of the early twentieth century had stopped, this ‘new ecology’ of the 1950s ensured that all waste of natural attributes would be minimized by rational ordering. It was a new name for an old idea. In this sense, conservation must be seen as a scientific movement.34 It was deduced in the late nineteenth century that resource development was, in essence, a technical matter, and would best be handled by ‘impartial’ technicians, rather than state legislators ruled by re‐election and pleasing constituents.35 The Ralph M. Parsons Company, responsible for drafting the Alliance plan, was described in this sterile light by Senator Moss. He argued that “its water resources‐planning engineers have taken a technical and economic approach to continental planning, leaving the problems of relationships, jurisdictions, and organization to the social and political specialists.”36 The experience of managing Western water, in

32 Linton, Social Nature of Natural Resources (note 31). 33 Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. UBC Press, 2006, 144‐145. 34 Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 18901920. Harvard University Press, 1959, 2. 35 Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (note 34), 3. 36 Moss, The Water Crisis (note 11), 243. - 74 - particular, was singled out as a prime example of the superiority of technical expertise over Eastern legislators. The process of rendering water technical was an easy leap from conceptualizing water as a resource to be secured. In fact, the manipulation of water as a resource could not have happened to its fullest extent without technical, rational, and efficient water management as its guiding principle. Senator Frank Moss of Utah, writing in The Water Crisis (1967), argued that “NAWAPA is not just a huge engineering job. It would require the greatest continuous and most intensive conservation effort ever thought of.” It is clear that Moss’s conception of ‘conservation’ stems from the Northern, ‘new ecology’ notion of the term. 37 There is little evidence that one of NAWAPA’s greatest champions valued ecological conservation over the preservation of continued American progress. The next step in rendering water technical was securing an adequate institutional support structure. Samuel Hays argued in 1959 that precedence had made it clear that the U.S. federal government must take the lead in large‐scale water projects. Hays believed that only the federal government could overcome jurisdictional squabbles between states, and only Congress could provide the substantial funds necessary to ensure the completion of large‐scale river development projects.38 The scale of planned diversion proposals at the time was larger than anything previously considered by the American government, and the infrastructure necessary to ensure their completion required an entirely new state apparatus to plan and manage such projects. “Uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production,” the high modernist state was bred in the crucible of scientific accomplishment, and its citizens were subsequently dizzy with optimism for the future 39 Beyond any one government department was a broader effort to ensure that the efforts at water development in the West were bound to succeed, in no small

37 Moss, The Water Crisis (note 11), 254. 38 Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (note 34), 101. 39 James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998, 4. - 75 -

part, because of its history and the promises of human redemption, democratic ideals, and manifest destiny. The state, in this case the agent for change, would have to take an activist role in planning and implementing water development projects through centralized planning, coordination, and control.40 This is where James Scott’s evaluation of high modernism requires careful consideration. High modernist ideology is best conceived, according to Scott, as a state possessing “a strong…version of the self‐confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”41 Despite Michel Foucault’s relative lack of interest in the twentieth century, he would likely have categorized these as “governmentality,” and the similarities are distinct. Measure Scott’s understanding of high modernism against Foucault’s definition of governmentality: “the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of the very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.”42 State proponents of the Alliance did just that, arguing for NAWAPA – unknowingly – from within Foucault’s governmentality framework. In advocating for NAWAPA, Moss, Wright, and others were targeting populations by playing upon fears of famine and drought to secure the citizenry against the backlashes of their own excesses. Both high modernism and governmentality share a common preoccupation with the routine tasks of managing populations, though they emphasize different aspects of this management. For Scott, technical and scientific progress is key to his high modernist conception, while Foucault seems to stress the institutional framework in which the daily tasks of wielding power occur. Scott stresses the importance of the activist state to such an extent that he posits his book as “a case

40 Linton, Social Nature of Natural Resources (note 31). 41 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 39), 4. 42 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 19771978. Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, 108. - 76 -

against the imperialism of high modernist, planned social order…and the mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge.”43 Nonetheless, he stresses the ideological component of high modernism and the requisite distance that must be placed between it and the scientific practice upon which the legitimacy of high modernism is based.44 I differ from Scott in my acceptance that the distance between ideology and scientific practice is crucial, given the extent to which they mutually constitute one another. How much distance can one place between them when one reinforces the other, informing the specific ways in which they act upon society? “Technology is chosen,” Arne Naess argues, “but not by consideration of society as a whole,” driven as technology is by the needs and desires of the society that controls it.45 The ideology of high modernism determines what form scientific practice will take. Such was the high modernist mentality of the American state throughout much of the early twentieth century before NAWAPA was proposed: in fact, this mindset predated the Columbia River Treaty between Canada and the United States. Richard Bocking draws a direct correlation between the ratification of the Columbia River Treaty in 1964 and a subsequent increase in irrigation acreage constructed by the Bureau of Reclamation. For Bocking, this acreage increase was a direct result of the increased water made available through the storage of excess water in Canada, but also through the increase in hydroelectric generating capacity which helped the additional irrigation acreage pay for itself.46 By the time the Columbia River Treaty was ratified and NAWAPA was actively considered, the American state had over half a century of working experience with the scale of planning, coordination, and control necessary to achieve the type of mega‐projects then in circulation, in addition to decades of small‐scale water diversion projects which had captured the imagination of Americans across the country. High modernism flourished in the American state, and was utilized to implement the ideology’s basic tenets: the administrative ordering of society must be present in addition to a state willingness

43 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 39), 6. 44 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 39), 5. 45 Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle (note 26), 95. 46 Richard Bocking, Canada's Water: For Sale? James Lewis & Samuel Publishing, 1972, 97. - 77 -

to implement the high modernist ideology using all forces necessary upon a “prostrate civil society” unable to resist.47 To one degree or another, all tenets of high modernism, as outlined by Scott, aligned between the coming to power of Elwood Mead at the Bureau in 1924 and the proposal of the North American Water and Power Alliance some forty years later. 3.3 – Canadian High Modernism – Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision High modernist planning was already a strong feature of the Canadian state before John Diefenbaker became Prime Minister of Canada in 1957, though no other Canadian Prime Minister so personified its grandiose potential as Diefenbaker did. Construction began on the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1954, linking the Atlantic Ocean with the interior Great Lakes, and was completed in 1959. The TransCanada Pipeline dispute in 1956, which saw the Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent force debate through the House of Commons to guarantee its success, had lasting ramifications for Canada and Diefenbaker. The pipeline, stretching in various forms from British Columbia to Nova Scotia, arguably led to the downfall of St. Laurent’s government by demonstrating Liberal arrogance in imposing legislation which had two lasting impacts. Firstly, the spectre of continental resource management fed fears of American incursions upon Canadian sovereignty as a result of large‐scale infrastructure plans framed as nation‐building projects. Secondly, anger towards the pipeline and dissatisfaction with the drift towards economic continentalism helped foster a new sense of Canadian nationalism that Diefenbaker, more than any other, was able to capitalize on.48 He redirected this pan‐Canadianism towards what became the cornerstone of his 1958 majority victory: as Diefenbaker told a Toronto crowd assembled in April, 1957 the Northern Vision would become, or so he hoped, the new “national consciousness.”49 While derided later as a political gimmick, the Northern Vision was part of a larger programme of national development backed by a political platform that

47 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 39), 4‐5. 48 Richard C. Powell, ‘Science, Sovereignty and Nation: Canada and the legacy of the International Geophysical Year, 1957‐1958’ in Journal of Historical Geography. Vol. 34, 2008, 625. 49 John G. Diefenbaker, One Canada: Memoirs of the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker. Vol II. Macmillan of Canada, 1976, 17. - 78 -

intended to turn Canadian focus away from the United States and towards the resource‐rich north. Inasmuch as John A. Macdonald had opened Canada on an east‐ west axis, so Diefenbaker hoped to build upon his legacy by extending Macdonald’s nation‐building vision to the North within the confines of “modern requirements and circumstances.”50 The Northern Vision eventually came to consist of a series of policies within the broad framework of national development. Highlights included a natural resource policy to focus on the processing of raw materials in Canada and the direction of foreign investment to the maximum benefit of Canada; a National Energy Board to ensure the most effective use of energy resources to the betterment of human welfare; and the ‘Roads to Resources’ programme in which the federal government would encourage and share the cost of building and maintaining highways linking the resource‐rich northern regions of the country with the more populous south.51 It was a programme with mutually reinforcing objectives: exploitation of Canada’s vast supply of natural resources was inextricably linked to unifying improvements in human welfare across the country. It was a notion shared by B.C. MP Jack Davis, speaking to the Rotary Club of Vancouver in 1966 on the topic of resource development. “We must learn how to manage our resources,” Davis argued, “so that their development gives the greatest possible impetus to the nation building process in this country.”52 If Canada, “a vast storehouse of natural resources” were to be developed, Diefenbaker, Davis, and others like them felt that Canadians must break the cycle of resource export and exploit the natural world towards building a better Canada.53 According to Richard Powell, “Diefenbaker’s ‘One Canada’ mandate prompted a determination to reconfigure geopolitical relations in the North American Arctic” to alleviate anxieties over contested

50 Diefenbaker, One Canada (note 49), 17. 51 Kyba, Alvin (note 1), 106. 52 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources fonds, RG 21, Accession 1990‐91/030, FA 21‐15, Communications Branch ‐ Press Releases and Speeches, 1950‐ 1987, “Resource Development: The Key to Canada’s Future by Jack Davis, M.P.” Box 3, #71‐28. December 6, 1966, 1. 53 Davis, Resource Development (note 52), 1. - 79 -

sovereignty with the United States, while taking stock of a resource base that represented the greatness of the country.54 This new focus on Canadian independence emerged through Diefenbaker’s labelling of the North as both the “New Frontier” and North America’s last frontier. He drew upon Americanized, romantic language in linking the North with the American West, though the difference was that while “the West” had largely been an American landscape, “the North” would offer Canadians a chance to be “uniquely ourselves.”55 This shift also occurred, in part, because of the increasingly untenable ignorance of the Canadian federal government towards the extent, location, and value of northern resources. As U.S. pressure for detailed geomagnetic and geodetic data of the Arctic from Canada increased, so too did fears that the integration of scientific knowledge between the two nations would ultimately lead to unwanted political and economic integration.56 In fact, fears of increased economic continentalism occupied much of Diefenbaker’s time in office, and certainly influenced how the Northern Vision came to be understood. Arguing that without a national policy on resource development Canada would lose economic independence and sovereignty, Alvin Hamilton pressed upon Diefenbaker to state in the House of Commons on February 11, 1957 that Canada in the days ahead will remain an independent Canada and will not inexorably drift into economic continentalism… Canada will maintain… a policy that will provide national development for a greater Canada in which growth and prosperity will not be purchased at the expense of our economic independence and our effective national sovereignty.57

Ironically, Diefenbaker’s anti‐Americanism failed to consider the volume and importance of American investment in Canada. Deriding the drift towards economic continentalism he perceived during the Liberal years, Diefenbaker called for private enterprise to assist in developing the North, seemingly ignoring the fact that the vast majority of firms interested in developing northern resources would be American.

54 Powell, Science, Sovereignty and Nation (note 48), 630; Diefenbaker, One Canada (note 49), 84. 55 Diefenbaker, One Canada (note 49), 225. 56 Powell, Science, Sovereignty and Nation (note 48), 629‐630. 57 Diefenbaker, One Canada (note 49), 285‐286. - 80 -

Coupled with the fear of economic subservience to the United States was the clear conception of the North and its resources as an unexploited landscape that contained riches simply waiting to be unearthed. To Hamilton, in a speech to the Pacific Northwest Trade Association, the North “represents a new world to conquer – but it is much more than that. It is like a great vault, holding in its recesses treasures to maintain and increase the material living standards which our countries take for granted.”58 The first nature of the North would be made into a second nature capable of maintaining the living standards of northern residents. Traditional perceptions of the North in Canadian geographical imaginations began changing at mid‐century. Farish and Lackenbauer argue that attempts to “modernize the north through new techniques and technologies were driven by the belief that the distinctiveness of the northern landscape could be subdued or even overcome.” One result of this effort at modernization was that the northern landscape – “removed from the ‘south’, but essential to national identity” – ceased to be thought of as separate from southern landscapes.59 By extending the terrain of what was considered both physically and mentally possible to include northern resource exploitation, Diefenbaker and the group of politicians, planners, and scientists he gathered around him to implement his vision extended the reach of capital into a region previously unaltered by massive human intervention, signalling the potential for a radical shift in the evolution of North America’s “last frontier.” As high modernist state planning, the Northern Vision failed at nation‐ building because of the lack of significant infrastructural achievements on the ground. Implicit in the Northern Vision was an effort by the state to target a region and its population for capitalist renovation. With state backing, the way would be paved for private enterprise to utilize nature as it desired, a point which Diefenbaker made clear in his memoirs: “our essential task was…to ensure the general economic climate in which private enterprise could feel confident that its efforts would be fairly rewarded if it put money and effort into northern

58 Kyba, Alvin (note 1), 124‐ 125. 59 Matthew Farish, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, ‘High modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik’ in Journal of Historical Geography. Vol. 35, 2009, 520. - 81 -

development.”60 Targeting the North as a region for expansion, Diefenbaker made it possible for future state planners, politicians, and engineers – even those south of the border – to consider the Arctic and its exploitation in new and exciting ways. By encouraging northern development through foreign investment and increased accessibility, Diefenbaker’s ‘opening’ of the Arctic for increased scientific exploration helped lay the groundwork for future plans like the North American Water and Power Alliance. 3.4 – NAWAPA and the Sociocultural Conceptualization of ‘nature’ Most descriptions of the Alliance feature nature as a passive agent in its own transformation. In the first half of the twentieth century, re‐conquering the West was positioned as a struggle for the engineer, responsible “in the broadest sense for the physical basis of [modern] life,” rather than the pioneer.61 The tools were technological rather than agricultural, and the nature to be tamed would be the rivers rather than the land.62 But the engineer’s struggle by the 1960s, much as it was for them in the nineteenth century, had little to do with how nature would be made increasingly lucrative, only that it should be made submissive to human demands. Short term losses of biological diversity and capital were acceptable in light of the long‐term benefits to be accrued by nature’s extensive manipulation. And regardless of the manner in which nature is considered, Kate Soper argues that all eco‐political discourses are concerned with clarifying human conceptions of second nature. They gesture at “how we ought to be more accurately conceptualizing (and thus more properly relating to) nature,” whether seen as possessing intrinsic value or as a mere cultural construction.63 Those who believed that NAWAPA was the best method for addressing water scarcity in the Southwest had faith in scientific and technological domination of the natural world so totalizing that nature would never react against such interventions. Proponents of the Alliance were reticent to discuss nature “striking back” because

60 Diefenbaker, One Canada (note 49), 283. 61 Robert F. Legget, Resources for Tomorrow: The Engineer’s Stewardship. The Sixth Wallberg Lecture: Convocation Hall. February 10, 1953. University of Toronto, 1953, 10. 62 Pasadena Independent Star‐News. How to Make a Desert Bloom. September 13, 1964. 63 Kate Soper, ‘Representing Nature.’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; December, 1998. Vol. 9, No. 4, 62. - 82 -

this would necessitate seeing nature as an active agent in its own manipulation: it would have to assume that nature, without a human population to modify its workings, possessed intrinsic value. Talking of “nature’s revenge” was left to scientists and academics who questioned the impact of NAWAPA upon regional climates as a result of shifting Arctic waters to arid regions, the opportunity for the Rocky Mountain Trench to create destructive landslides, and the effect of river displacement on local flora and fauna, such as muskeg in the North.64 Nature as a mere collection of exploitable resources proved much more alluring and flexible for those in power deciding the future of water management in North America. As Harvey has indicated, “the science of nature as of society was meant to reveal not just what existed but what stood to be created.”65 Those who conceived of nature in this way held a particularly limited and narrow view of the natural world when they considered nature, imagining what more they might create with it then already existed. The short step from socially constructing this notion of nature to physically reconstituting it in deliberate and violent ways was initiated with NAWAPA’s drafting, though with the plan’s ultimate failure, the final step was never taken. The Alliance depended upon a first nature external to a world of second nature that humans had fabricated, a first nature that was “inherently nonsocial and nonhuman,” and thus without emotional connotations for humanity.66 It was within the realm of second nature that humans wielded incredible power over the natural world. To conceive of first nature in a manner beneficial to Parson’s engineering firm required no such expansive thinking, encompassing as it did the world which provided the “raw material from which society is built.”67 What was created was a hierarchy of needs: it was a short step from conceptualizing first nature’s needs as subservient to second nature to placing American developmental and financial

64 See McGauhey Arid Lands in Perspective (note 15), 360; Bryan, Much is Taken, Much Remains (note 8), 156; and Norman Radforth, quoted in Royal Society of Canada. Dolman, Claude E., ed. Water Resources of Canada. Symposia Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966. University of Toronto Press, 1967, 27. 65 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 6), 130. 66 Noel Castree, 'Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics' in Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, eds. Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics. Blackwell Publishing, 2001, 6. 67 Castree, 'Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics' (note 66), 7. - 83 -

needs ahead of similar Canadian growth. Parallels are not difficult to find. British Columbia MP Jack Davis argued in 1966 that the United States was deliberately keeping Canada in an inequitable, neo‐colonial relationship in order to maintain more profitable resource‐refining jobs in America, leaving Canadians free to retain their historic role as hewers of wood and drawers of water.68 Lest anyone suspect Davis of skepticism toward American intentions or of unfettered growth, he added that the failure of Canada to export raw materials to the United States at competitive market prices is “to cheat Canadians out of their natural heritage.” Instead, Canadians should encourage raw material export and charge “all that the market will bear.”69 Davis explicitly included water in his discussion. The Dam the Dams Campaign, a grassroots watchdog group started in 1965 to lobby against Canadian water export to the United States, also indicated the benefits to be accrued by American financial institutions over the short‐ and long‐ term future. The $40 billion Canadian investment in the plan would undeniably have to be borrowed from American banks, they argued, forcing Canada into “perpetual debt” despite efforts to pay off American creditors.70 The $4 billion in annual hydroelectric revenues would offset the $3.2 billion in 8% interest (as of 1964), provided that the cost of NAWAPA would not fluctuate, which it did. Original estimates of anywhere from $80 to $100 billion soon became $100 to $200 billion, increasing Canada’s initial cost and the interest to be paid on the loan. If Canada’s share stood at $80 billion, interest at 8% would still total $6.4 billion, far outstripping any annual revenues to be gained by hydroelectric output.71 Within the NAWAPA debate the notion of an autonomous external nature emerged as a way in which nature could be utilized at arm’s length. Parallels between the prevailing North American attitude towards nature and the perceived American treatment of Canadian needs as subservient to American desires ran throughout the discussions held during the Resources for Tomorrow Conference in 1961. For example, Queen’s University president J.J. Deutsch argued that

68 Davis, Resource Development (note 52), 3. 69 Davis, Resource Development (note 52), 7 . 70 Dam the Dams. The Water Plot. Dam the D ams Campaign, 1965. 71 Dam the Dams, The Water Plot (note 70). - 84 -

the technological breakthroughs [in the United States] which have made… development possible… have had to be accompanied by huge investments of capital and by the availability of large markets… In the future the tar sands… and the Arctic Islands will yield their riches only to new technology, to immense new investment and to new markets.72

The stress that Deutsch placed upon nature “yielding riches only to new technology” highlights the continuation of the traditional notion of the land being regulated by technological advancements. His emphasis on the need for large capital investments and larger markets was an easy allusion to the dominance of American finance and purchasing power to the Canadian economy. Deutsch’s comments at the conference followed on the heels of W.T. Easterbrook’s reminder that Canada was “very much a North American nation…and our national policies must be worked out very largely in this context.”73 Each speaker suggested that if nature was external to human society, than it must belong to whoever claims it for rational utilization. External and universal natures offer two examples of competing discourses on the meaning of ‘nature.’ Often the competition between discourses on nature exists on an uneven plane. The NAWAPA debate emerged after centuries of theorizing on nature with deep roots in Enlightenment thinking that delegitimized the natural world, placing it at the mercy of Northern societies. As Aldo Leopold argued in his groundbreaking work A Sand County Almanac, “an ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposed the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism.” He added that “we can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”74 Put another way, an ecological ethic only became necessary once nature as a ‘biotic mechanism’ in its own right became nature as a ‘biotic mechanism’ in the production of capital. Proponents of NAWAPA were fortunate to argue from within the historically accepted framework of nature‐as‐resource, a perspective that

72 J.J. Deutsch, quoted in Resources for Tomorrow Conference, Montreal, Quebec. October 23‐28, 1961. Vol. 3 – Proceedings of the Conference. Queen’s Printer, 1961, 21. 73 W.T. Easterbrook, quoted in Resources for Tomorrow Conference, Montreal, Quebec. October 23‐ 28, 1961. Vol. 3 – Proceedings of the Conference. Queen’s Printer, 1961, 16. 74 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, 1969; also see Holmes Rolston III, Philosophy Gone Wild: Essays in Environmental Ethics. Prometheus Books, 1986, 18, where Rolston argues that Leopold is seeking “to advance the ethical frontier from the merely interpersonal to the region of humans in transaction with their environment.” - 85 -

demanded nature be broken into constituent resources for human exploitation because any who sought to problematize this often violent scenario had to do so from outside the dominant discourse on nature. Social conceptions of nature reflect the dominant ideologies and identities of the time. Swyngedouw has argued that the water/money/power nexus has been central to the process of urbanization, and that the boundary between urban and rural, or between society and nature, has become so blurred that “there is no longer an outside or a limit to the city.”75 The ideologies of society cannot help but infuse differing conceptions of nature when the process of urbanization itself is “primarily a particular socio‐spatial process of metabolizing nature, or urbanizing the environment.”76 The idea of NAWAPA as one of the largest‐scale urbanization projects in North American history is an interesting notion deserving of further study, though it is beyond the scope of this work. Suffice it to say, the water/money/ power nexus highlights important linkages between the components as agents of control: each could operate independently as a means of controlling some aspect of the natural world, yet they function more effectively as a whole. The nexus could easily be substituted with nature/capital/dominance and its implementation achieve the same authoritarian purposes. It is thus unsurprising that a capitalist society would project principles onto nature that reflect the dominant values of accumulation, profit, production, and material consumption. The urbanization process has been instrumental to “momentous environmental changes and alleged problems” that have witnessed the “emergence of environmental issues on the political agenda.” 77 Yet when considering NAWAPA as an effort at extending the urban realm further afield, it seems natural that “momentous environmental changes” would accompany the urbanization process. Around the world, water mega‐projects have a “homogenizing effect” upon the societies in which they are constructed, limiting not only the natural world but

75 Erik Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford University Pres s, 2004, 10. 76 Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (note 75), 8. 77 Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (note 75), 9. - 86 -

the built landscape.78 The state, successful in its endeavors to simplify and rationalize nature, could as of the mid‐twentieth century apply these principles to the design of society. “Industrial strength social engineering was born,” according to Scott, on the ambition and ability of the nation‐state to control nature. 79 Yet Castree problematizes this notion, arguing that nature remains capable of influencing society. Since “there is…no objective, nondiscursive way of comprehending nature,” he argues, “we have to live with the fact that different individuals and groups use different discourses to make sense of the same nature/s.”80 In creating truths, Castree argues that there is an inherent struggle within and between discourses that society places upon nature, determining acceptance in the twin arenas of social struggle and power politics.81 In response to a chicken/egg question regarding society and nature, Michel Foucault maintained that “it is not the naturalness of processes of nature itself, as the nature of the world, but processes of a naturalness specific to relations between men, to what happens spontaneously when they cohabit, come together, exchange, work, and produce.”82 He added that “it is a naturalness that basically did not exist until [the Enlightenment] and which, if not named as such, at least begins to be thought of and analyzed as the naturalness of society.”83 Remembering Harvey’s message that “all critical examinations of the relation to nature are simultaneously critical examinations of society,” perhaps Foucault was suggesting that a discussion of society constituting or constructing nature may be backwards: that nature is indeed responsible for the current notions we have of ‘society.’ 84 Despite advanced technological achievements in the past half‐century, the ecological crisis may be

78 Bocking, Canadian Water Resources Association (note 25), 116. 79 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 39), 91. 80 Castree, 'Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics' (note 66), 12; also see Noel Castree, and Bruce Braun, ‘Construction of Nature and Nature of Construction: Analytical and Political Tools for Building Survivable Futures’ in Braun, Bruce and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. Routledge, 1998, 32, “where they argue that “recognizing the complex intertwinings of nature, culture, science and technology allows us to see the various ways that it is impossible to change the socia l order without at the same time modifying the natural order, and vice versa.” 81 Castree, 'Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics' (note 66), 12. 82 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (note 42), 349. 83 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (note 42), 349. 84 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 6), 174. - 87 -

seen to closely parallel the advent of the Industrial Revolutions: science has only recently begun to grasp the vast implications of two centuries of unlimited development. Arturo Escobar questions whether “the crisis of nature is also a crisis of identity” because the basic constructs of modernity – including nature and culture but also society, politics, and economics – have “not equipped us for the task of interrogating ourselves and nature in ways which might yield novel answers.”85 In other words, Escobar is asking if humanity can know itself without fully comprehending nature through the social mechanisms societies have created. Beyond the identity of the individual, but intricately bound together with society, is the central role of the state in the drafting of the NAWAPA proposal. For high modernist planning as grand as NAWAPA to be taken with “terrifying seriousness,” according to James Laxer, an elaborate state structure was required that took society and nature as subservient to its heroic ideals.86 State action was central to the implementation of high modernist schemes because no other carrier of such proposals, including capitalist entrepreneurs, possessed the requisite influence and power to ensure their successful implementation. Within the state apparatus, high modernist thinking found an audience among planners, engineers, architects, and scientists, those people whose skill sets could be put to use as “designers of the new order.”87 High modernism appealed greatly to the segments of society who stood the most to gain – in status, power, and wealth – from its worldview. As Scott argues, “the position accorded to [the bureaucratic intelligentsia, and technicians, among others] is not just one of rule and privilege but also one of responsibility for the great works of nation building and social transformation.” 88 NAWAPA, in this sense, was a tragic example of the rule of experts being taken to its extreme: state planners, scientists, and engineers acting as the architects of a new state. Resource development had a tremendous role to play in the idea of nation‐building implicit in NAWAPA and other high modernist

85 Arturo Escobar, ‘After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology’ in Current Anthropology. Vol. 40, No. 1. February 1999, 1. 86 James Laxer. The Energy Poker Game: The Politics of the Continental Resource Deal, New Press, 1970, 15. 87 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 39), 5. 88 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 39), 96. - 88 -

projects. MP Jack Davis tied resource development and nation‐building together. He argued that Canada “must learn how to manage our resources so that their development gives the greatest possible impetus to the nation building process in this country.”89 NAWAPA was no mere engineering project. As Scott has indicated, this was a “great work of nation building and social transformation,” mirroring in pomposity what it possessed in physical scale.90 It is no coincidence that in The Water Crisis, Sen. Moss titled a chapter “Make No Little Plans,” and argued that the solution to the water crisis must mirror the magnitude of the problem.91 After NAWAPA, the scale of water diversion proposals had to decrease if any were to be accepted. Adherents and critics alike commented in its aftermath that disdain for the NAWAPA proposal for any number of economic, ecological, or political reasons should not entirely dismiss water diversions in North America. Bob Newbury, a civil engineer from the University of Manitoba, argued to the Canadian Water Resources Association conference in 1973 that society had to be careful to differentiate between constructive projects such as in‐basin, small‐scale, domestic withdrawals and those whose ultimate goal was less the improvement of the environment than more short‐term, economically minded objectives, like the Alliance.92 Soper echoes this sentiment in arguing that “it is one thing to question the hegemony of Northern science and instrumental rationality, but it is another to suggest that any and every attempt to bring a scientific and rational perspective to bear on the management of human affairs (including our relationship to nature) is inherently oppressive.”93 She provides an important balance to any discussion of NAWAPA within the context of intervening in nature in order to rationalize it – that there is nothing a priori oppressive in humanity’s interventions into nature on account of humanity existing squarely within the natural world.

89 Davis, Resource Development (note 52), 1. 90 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 39), 96. 91 Moss, The Water Crisis (note 11), 248. 92 Robert Newbury, quoted in Canadian Water Resources Association. 25th Anniversary Conference. CWRA, 1973, 117‐118. 93 Kate Soper, “Nature/‘nature’” in Robertson, George, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, and Tim Putnam, eds. FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture. Routledge, 1996, 32. - 89 -

The gravity of this task is made greater considering that the fundamental principle of ecology is that when intervening in the natural world, humans can never do merely “one thing.”94 The interconnectivity of nature ensures that any ecological disruption can never focus exclusively on one element of the system, and must consider the eventuality of such an approach failing to account for unknown variables, impacts, and other externalities.95 Human interventions into the natural world rarely avoid creating new and unforeseen problems that generate their own set of environmental costs, an idea that ties together Rachel Carson’s reminder of the interconnectivity of nature with James Scott’s caution to favour reversibility in any environmental intrusions.96 Yet the contempt and suspicion engendered by the Alliance in many Canadians, following close on the heels of the Columbia River Treaty, ensured that any plan of such magnitude would never be deemed valuable enough to necessitate the requisite environmental assessments. Others unsupportive of the United States’ continental water ambitions reminded critics that despite the actions of the Ralph M. Parsons Company and the support from Sen. Frank Moss, Congressman Jim Wright, and others in government, the plan received no official support from the Johnson or Nixon administrations. They also indicated that the American government only speculated about long‐distance water transfer from Canada without ever giving it full support.97 The Alliance was drafted within a high modernist social context with intentions of being implemented: it remains a tragedy that something so violent and unnecessary was conceived, though the tragedy is lessened by North American society’s rejection of the plan.

94 Garret Hardin, citing Rachel Carson in ‘To Trouble a Star: The Cost of Intervention in Nature,’ in Roelofs, Robert, Joseph Crowley and Donald Hardesty, eds. Environment and Society: A Book of Readings on Environmental Policy, Attitudes, and Values. Prentice‐Hall Inc., 1974, 119. 95 Hardin, To Trouble a Star (note 94), 119. 96 William Ophuls, and A. Stephen Boyan, Jr., Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited: The Unravelling of the American Dream. W.H. Freeman and Company, 1992, 29. 97 Anthony Scott, Joe Olynyk and Steven Renzetti. Inquiry on Federal Water Policy. Research Paper #7. The Economics of Water Export Policy. Queen’s Printer, 1985, 34. - 90 -

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Chapter Four – NAWAPA: A Grandiose and Failed Proposal

“For the next generation of Americans, I believe it is not an exaggeration to say that water…may be the most critical national problem.” – U.S. Sen. Frank Moss, The Water Crisis

From 1964 to 1973, freshwater resources were the primary focus for Canadian government and academic commentators interested in the environment, growth, energy, and trade. Water was singled out as key to the future development of the Canadian economy, especially in the Canadian North, where water was at its most abundant. In these discussions of Canada’s future water needs, NAWAPA was the central point of reference; any proposed water transfer projects emanating from both Canada and the United States in this time were either variations on NAWAPA’s continental scale, or scaled down versions emphasizing possibilities for one region such as James Bay or the Great Lakes.1 In a speech to the Pacific Northwest Trade Association in 1965, Canadian Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources Arthur Laing referenced NAWAPA as “the scheme you have all heard of” before going on to situate his discussion of Canadian water export to the United States solely within the framework of NAWAPA’s proposed transfers.2 After NAWAPA found a sponsor in American Senator Frank Moss, it became notorious for the manner in which it proposed to divert Canadian waters south, a grandiose and American plan that was, for a time, the high water mark for large‐scale water diversions and withdrawals globally. While NAWAPA would not be the largest water re‐engineering scheme ever proposed for North America, its notoriety emerged from its being the first of such massive proposals. Even towards the end of this era, as it became clear that NAWAPA was fading in public acceptance, it remained in vogue to speak of “NAWAPA‐like” water transfers. Ultimately, NAWAPA was a failed proposal, yet one whose scope and scale captured the imagination of North Americans. “Small boys,” argued B.C. MP Jack Davis in 1966, “are intrigued by the prospect of [building dams] for controlling

1 Rorke Bryan, Much is Taken, Much Remains: Canadian Issues in Environmental Conservation. Duxbury Press, 1973, pp. 158‐167. 2 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, C.O.P. CA.R. 64, “Water ‐ The Ultimate Resource: An Address by the Honourable Arthur Laing, Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources, at a luncheon of the Pacific Northwest Trade Association, Portland, Oregon, April 12, 1965.” Ottawa, 1965, 8.

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nature this way. And so are many adults. We also like to do things big. And we get a sense of elation when we see gigantic projects under way.”3 Concurrently, other equally impressive engineering feats were taking place around the world, creating “senses of elation:” the link between France and England under the English Channel, the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt, the diverting of the Siberian and Volga Rivers in the Soviet Union, and the St. Lawrence Seaway and Columbia River projects closer to home.4 The 1960s was a decade of water‐related engineering projects where minds were opened to a “jet age type of thinking” that increasingly made plans like NAWAPA seem possible. 5 Addressing the Canadian Water System Manufacturers Association in Toronto in 1966, Jack Davis, Parliamentary Secretary to the

Figure 4.1 North American Water and Power Alliance (Source: Roland Minister of Mines and Kelley, Dir. of Natural Resources, Ralph M. Parsons Co., January 1967) Technical Surveys, argued enthusiastically that the examples of the Columbia Treaty and the St. Lawrence Seaway prove that “Canadians can move mountains,” and that “we can ultimately control all of the water resources of the nation.”6

3 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources fonds, RG 21, Accession 1990‐91/030, FA 21‐15, Communications Branch ‐ Press Releases and Speeches, 1950‐ 1987, “Water – Our Greatest Resource by Jack Davis, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys,” Box 3, #71‐28 – June 1, 1966, 1. 4 Anthony Scott, Joe Olynyk and Steven Renzetti. Inquiry on Federal Water Policy. Research Paper #7. The Economics of Water Export Policy. Queen’s Printer, 1985, 30. 5 A.E. Palmer, ‘The Problem: Transfer of Water?’ Reclamation; (September) Vol. VI, No. 2, 1966, 2. 6 Davis, Water – Our Greatest Resource (note 3), 2.

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The idea that it was both technologically possible and economically feasible to re‐engineer the water systems of North America was previously unimaginable. To some, it was extraordinarily fulfilling to know that humanity possessed the ability to ensure that an irrational nature could be made operational in an efficient manner. The Alliance became ingrained in thinking about water transfer in North America and so acrimonious an issue by the OPEC oil crisis of 1973 that after NAWAPA, while other proposals would be optioned, no large‐scale water projects could be made publically acceptable. After NAWAPA shifted the scale of acceptable water transfer proposals, one commentator concluded that “we shall never be the same again.”7 This chapter will focus on NAWAPA as both a grandiose and failed proposal. I will discuss the implications of NAWAPA for Canadian sovereignty and territory as it pertains to the proposal’s continental scale. I will also question the assumption that scientific and technological domination over nature will inevitably lead to both the satisfaction of human needs and the domination of human beings. Leiss reminds us that “the mastery of nature is not a project of science per se, but rather a broader social task.”8 Key issues highlighted in this chapter include the implications of NAWAPA and other water transfer projects for the future of Canada as an independent nation in North America, water within the context of other Canadian exports in the 1960s such as oil and natural gas, and the early successes and ultimate failure of the Alliance. This chapter will examine nature as the unknown variable throughout the NAWAPA debate and the extent to which water was only nominally centred in that debate. In considering the larger issues of sovereignty, territoriality, economic security, ecological scarcity, foreign ownership and dependence, and social issues of heritage and nationalism that underline the entire discussion, merely focusing on concern for freshwater in NAWAPA barely scratches the surface of what the Alliance encompassed. 4.1 – Parsons’ NAWAPA Plan The minutiae of the NAWAPA proposal have been detailed in a number of governmental and scholarly sources, and were sketched previously in the

7 Palmer, Transfer of Water (note 5), 2. 8 William Leiss, The Domination of Nature. George Braziller, 1972, 146.

- 93 - introduction.9 I will not dwell here on the technical specifics of the plan; issues of acre‐feet, hydro‐electrical production in kilowatt hours, and cubic‐kilometre runoff are valuable when attempting to comprehend the proposal’s magnitude, yet are ultimately unnecessary details relative to my objectives. NAWAPA was always more than the sum of its parts, though the technical specifics of how Parsons engineering firm intended to use 240 reservoirs, 112 irrigation systems, and 17 navigation channels to transfer over 18 cubic kilometres worth of freshwater annually from Alaska, the Yukon, and British Columbia remain remarkable.10 To this end, the U.S. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development (WWD) in 1966 offered a succinct description: NAWAPA provides for the collection of surplus waters from the Fraser, Yukon, Peace, Athabasca, and other rivers of Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and through a system of canals, tunnels, and rivers to generate industrial and municipal power as portions of it descend to the sea coast and to redistribute the remainder of it to water‐scarce areas of Canada, the Western and Midwestern United States, and northern Mexico. 11

The notion that NAWAPA would only be capturing “surplus” water is a point worth emphasizing. Democratic Senator Frank Moss of Utah was quick to inform the gathering at the Royal Society of Canada that “it is important to keep in mind that the concept deals with surplus water,” a point he reiterates later in the debate in

9 For alternative perspectives or a more extensive breakdown of the NAWAPA plan and its impact upon the North American landscape, see Bryan, Much is Taken (note 1), pp. 152‐158; Harold D. Foster, and W.R.D. Sewell. Water: The Emerging Crisis in Canada. James Lorimer & Company, 1981, pp. 30‐34; Frank E. Moss, The Water Crisis. Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1967, pp. 243‐254; Ralph M. Parsons Co. NAWAPA: North American Water and Power Alliance. Brochure No. 606‐2934‐19. Los Angeles, 1964; W.R.D. Sewell, ‘Pipedream or Practical Possibility?’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; 1967. Vol. 23, 11; W.R.D. Sewell, ‘Inter‐basin Water Diversions: Canadian Experiences and Perspectives’ in Golubev, Genady N. and Asit K. Biswas, eds. Large Scale Water Transfers: Emerging Environmental and Social Experiences. United Nations Environmental Programme. Tycolly Publishing, 1985, pp. 18‐23; Jim Wright. The Coming Water Famine, Coward‐McCann Inc., 1963, pp. 218‐231; Sewell, W.R.D. ‘Water Across the American Continent.’ The Geographical Magazine; (June), Vol. XLVI, No. 9, 1974, pp. 472‐480; University of British Columbia. Community and Regional Planning Studies. Student Project 6. NAWAPA: An Impetus to Regional Development in British Columbia. April, 1966; Scott, Economics of Water Export Policy (note 4), 29‐30; Richard Bocking, Canada's Water: For Sale? James Lewis & Samuel Publishing, 1972, pp. 71‐88. 10 Foster and Sewell, Water: The Emerging Crisis in Canada (note 9), 31. 11 United States Senate. Committee on Public Works. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development. A Summary of Water Resource Projects, Plans, and Studies Relating to the Western and Midwestern United States. Government Printing Office, 1966, 2.

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targeting “unused water runoff” for the Alliance.12 “The U.S. provides our best and virtually our only export market for surplus energy products,” argued Energy, Mines, and Resources Minister J.J. Greene in 1969, stressing that “the key word here is surplus.” Greene was discussing the feasibility of a “total approach” to continental energy resources with the Nixon administration.13 He later promised a “Canada‐ comes‐first” framework within which to consider the continental energy package, specifying that surplus or not, any potential energy deal would not include export of Canadian water, but would include hydro‐electric power generation.14 Senator Moss, NAWAPA’s most ardent supporter, was chair of the U.S. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development and was instrumental in the drafting of its final report on the feasibility of NAWAPA: this is worth considering in relation to the report’s description of “surplus” waters. Figure 4.1 provides a visual depiction of the continental scale of the plan, stretching from Alaska in the north to the Mexican province of Chihuahua in the south. Yet the WWD Report was not overly optimistic about the Alliance’s ability to meet long‐term American water needs. The Report noted that “water made available by the NAWAPA concept would double present supplies yet if completed by the year 2000 would still fall short of supplying total need.”15 However, it does go on to indicate that without implementing the NAWAPA concept the “supply of water in [the] Western United States will be substantially below the need.” While far from perfect, the 369 individual projects supplying 4.3 million acre‐feet of “surplus” stored water that encompass the proposal would have provided the United States with the largest volume of water for only marginally more money than was already allotted for small‐scale water

12 Frank Moss, quoted in Royal Society of Canada. Dolman, Claude E., ed. Water Resources of Canada. Symposia Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966. University of Toronto Press, 1967, 5, 7; italics original. 13 Toronto Daily Star. A Resource Pool with the U.S. Wouldn’t be a Sell‐out. December 11, 1969. 14 Ottawa Citizen. ‘Canada Comes First – Greene.’ January 16, 1970; Barry Commoner is also quick to highlight the similarities between thinking on freshwater resources and the discourse on energy resources more broadly. He argues that “the energy problem will not be solved by technological sleight‐of‐hand, clever tax schemes, or patchwork legislation,” an idea easily applicable to other resoures, freshwater included. Quoted in Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power: Energy and Economic Crisis. Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, 4. 15 United States Senate, Summary of Water Resource Projects (note 11), 5.

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diversion projects before 1964.16 By streamlining a multitude of smaller‐scale projects already proposed into one massive plan, the WWD Report argued that NAWAPA was a fiscally responsible alternative to fragmented diversion efforts. Depictions of NAWAPA, however detailed, often speak of the natural world they are depicting in the vaguest of terms, if at all. Technical explanations of the plan talk plainly of reversing the flow of rivers, creating a reservoir‐canal‐river system to redistribute northern waters across the continent, generating hydro power as water flows usefully to the seas, and creating a 500 mile long storage facility between mountain ranges, effectively severing east‐west overland transportation routes. These are monumental undertakings when taken individually, and collectively the scope is enormous. Yet Ralph M. Parsons’ brochure on the plan calmly states that “NAWAPA is a concept…for collecting excess water of the Northwestern part of the North American continent and distributing it to the water deficient areas of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.”17 This unadorned description reveals nothing of the magnitude and violence of the proposal, calmly reiterating the plan’s purpose – to transfer unused water to locations where it can be more efficiently utilized. NAWAPA could be made to sound profoundly simple. 4.2 – Science and Technology in the Rise and Fall of NAWAPA Those who believed that NAWAPA was the only viable method with which the critical scarcity of water in the American Southwest could be overcome possessed an overriding belief in the transformative power of science and technology to rescue society from the perceived problems of scarcity and want. Yet a belief in the transformative power of science was in itself nothing new: what was remarkable about NAWAPA, aside from the scale in which it operated, was the finality of science’s domination over nature. So blatantly did NAWAPA’s drafters fail to adhere to James Scott’s second precaution in state planning – to favour reversibility in any ecological intervention “given our great ignorance about how they interact” – that the scientific, rational ordering of nature became too

16 United States Senate, Summary of Water Resource Projects (note 11), 5. 17 Ralph M. Parsons Co., NAWAPA Brochure (note 9).

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overwhelming.18 In a strange catch‐22, NAWAPA’s success as much as its failure rested upon the strength and infallibility of science and technology to save the American Southwest. The plan laid bare the consequences of the unchecked influence of scientific ordering of nature, a bleak and unimaginative future of conc re te rivers, pipelines, and canals flowing to the beat of an American drum. Yet the domination of nature is only part of the story. While controlling nature by means of “large‐scale, hierarchically organized and controlled, and technologically intensive infrastructures” did imply a set of “power mechanisms… predicated on forms of engineering nature,” efforts at controlling nature are frequently designed as efforts to regulate and dominate human beings.19 As Leiss argued, “the real object of the domination of nature is not nature, but men.”20 Understanding these twin pillars of the domination of nature inherent in NAWAPA is necessary to appreciate the extent to which NAWAPA and its proponents were dependent upon scientific advancement to avert the perceived crisis of ecological scarcity in the Southwest. “Our needs are mounting year by year,” argued EMR’s Deputy Minster Jack Davis in 1966, “but technology is on our side.”21 What David Harvey calls the “grumbling persistency of the problem of ecoscarcity” in the modern world is testimony to the relative failure of society to utilize science and technology in the name of the Enlightenment ideals of emancipation and self‐realization.22 Democratic Congressman Jim Wright of Texas argued in 1966 that sections of the Southwest were experiencing “critical scarcity,” and that the problem of water shortages in the arid regions of the country could only be solved by transporting large volumes from areas of abundance to where water was in shorter supply.23 What makes statements about ecoscarcity so ironic

18 James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998, 345. 19 Erik Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford University Pr ess, 2004, 133. 20 William Leiss, The Domination of Nature. George Braziller, 1972, pg. 122. 21 Davis, Water – Our Greatest Resource (note 3), 2. 22 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishing, 1996, 139; for William Lei ss, “the need for security, arising always afresh out of the irrational structure of social relations, is ne ver appeased.” See Leiss, Domination of Nature (note 20), 162. 23 Wright, The ComingWater Famine (note 9), 230.

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in this sense are that they emanate from a society of affluence which has generated its own ecological scarcity, rather than it being an accident of geography. Harvey is quick to indicate that a conception of nature as static within the discourse on ecoscarcity ignores the transformative substance of nature. “To declare a state of ecoscarcity,” according to Harvey, “is in effect to say that we have not the will, wit, or capacity to change our state of knowledge, our social goals, cultural modes, and technological mixes, or our form of economy, and that we are powerless to modify either our material practices or ‘nature’ according to human requirements.”24 For Harvey, it is the dismissal of human ability to alter the environment through constructive rather than destructive means that irks him: it presupposes not only the relative weakness of humanity to change our condition, but the ultimate supremacy of technological solutions to manage current ecological problems. Harvey also points to the important ways in which ecoscarcity is socially constructed to support classes and lifestyles that benefit from keeping other social groups in poverty, rather than a debate about nature’s preservation.25 This sentiment was also expressed by Brigadier‐General Kelly of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at the 1973 Canadian Water Resources Association conference on Canadian water issues. He claimed that “demand for [development] projects could be greatly reduced if we were prepared to change our lifestyles, [but] I don’t see that attitude in the United States.”26 Harvey again argues that the declaration of an ecological scarcity crisis is as fabricated as the scarcity itself. In the case of NAWAPA, it was formulated by a society in the American Southwest that cited the crisis even as they deflected attention away from their central role in its making, while concurrently advocating for technology‐as‐saviour.27 The belief that drastic change was necessitated by the scope of the water scarcity “crisis” in the American Southwest led to the idea that solutions such as mega‐diversions, weather modification, or desalinization will effectively manage or

24 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 22), 147. 25 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 22), 148. 26 Brigadier General Kelly, quoted in Canadian Water Resources Association. 25th Anniversary Conference. CWRA, 108. 27 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 22), 147.

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solve the scarcity issue. While this idea is tied to an overriding faith in technology to overcome natural limitations to human growth, it also strikes at the deeper belief that temporary solutions to systemic problems of resource overuse will be effective harbingers of salvation. “Man may soon find the economic means for exploiting the weather, saline waters, and algae for resource preservation,” argued E.F. Murphy in 1967, “but, even when he does, there will still be scarcity. Man himself has seemed to be the one unlimited factor.”28 Given that NAWAPA was drafted in the 1960s, the millennium was taken as the standard yardstick against which future water needs, population, and economic growth were measured. Never was making the American Southwest more habitable for ever‐increasing numbers of people seen as problematic, as if realizing NAWAPA in 1964 (in addition to years needed for environmental and economic feasibility studies and a 30‐year construction timeline) would ensure that water needs of the Southwest would be met for all time. Somehow, the realization that making more water available for greater numbers of people would inevitably generate exponentially greater need was not adequately considered or provided for in the initial NAWAPA plan. California Tomorrow, a conservation group based in Los Angeles, proved exceptional in their early recognition of ecological factors as a significant deterrent to large‐scale water projects. “In light of the merging land‐use ethic, which recognizes that man must…place himself in better balance with his total environment,” in 1963 California Tomorrow released an alternative plan for meeting Southern California’s water needs.29 While stopping short of calling for a halt to expanding development, they pressed for smart growth to occur in areas with sufficient water availability to remove the need for its import. In an article on California Tomorrow, Kimmis Hendrick noted that “the concept of ecology [was] unheard of ten years ago,” yet

28 E.F. Murphy, Water Purity: A Study in Legal Control of Natural Resources. University of Wisconsin Press, 1961, 16. 29 Christian Science Monitor. Conservationists Look Again at California’s Big water Project. March 8, 1963, 13.

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was gaining increasing influence as a means by which residents of Los Angeles could oppose large‐scale water diversion projects.30 The fundamental mistake in the conception that technological progress and mastery over nature is tantamount to satisfying human needs “is the expectation that the rationality of the scientific methodology itself is transferred intact, as it were, to the social process and mitigates social conflict by satisfying human wants through the intensified exploitation of nature’s resources.”31 And as Leiss goes on to claim, these increasingly dramatic socio‐technical incursions into nature do not go unresisted. The “revolt of nature,” as Max Scheler called it, is evident in both universal and external nature. Since there is inevitably “an inherent limit in the irrational exploitation of external nature…by irrational technological applications,” we are justified in speaking of “a revolt of external nature which accompanies the rebellion of human nature.”32 While it is questionable whether the resistance that NAWAPA faced can be described as human rebellion, it is worth considering that in the years since Leiss’s The Domination of Nature was first published, the breakdown of external nature appears to have taken a more dramatic and obvious turn in the forms of acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, freshwater pollution, declining water levels, and climate change, among other ecological problems. Domination over nature, however, has always maintained a broader social task. Domination of nature as a conduit to domination over human beings is the “hidden dimension” to controlling the natural world which has sought mastery over society through scientific means, responding to “aspects in the social dynamic.”33 Yet the irony of those who sought to use NAWAPA to further regulate society is that the unstated goal of this domination was to keep people consuming in the same ways they had always consumed: recklessly, above their means, and with little regard to the impact this consumption had upon the environment, let alone whether the environment could sustain their consumptive practices. NAWAPA may be seen

30 Christian Science Monitor. Conservationists Look Again at California’s Big Water Project (note 29), 13. 31 Leiss, Domination of Nature (note 20), 118‐119. 32 Leiss, Domination of Nature (note 20), 164. 33 Leiss, Domination of Nature (note 20), 96.

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as an effort by the state to control an irrational nature and a docile society in one blow by regulating the resources necessary to keep g rowth and consumption rising. Yet technological advancement is not a priori logical. As Naess indicates, “technology is chosen, but not by consideration of society as a whole,” hinting at the use of technological selection as a social weapon.34 Leiss argues that “advances in technology clearly enhance the power of the ruling groups within societies and in the relations among nations: and as long as there are wide disparities in the distribution of power among individuals, social groups, and states, technology will function as an instrument of domination.”35 This can be seen in the proposal calling for the flooding of thousands of square miles of territory in British Columbia and the Yukon, including the partial or complete destruction of Whitehorse, Yukon, and Prince George, B.C. The devastating impact this would have had upon the estimated 60,000 residents living in the way of NAWAPA’s realization was described by Richard Bocking as “genocidal.”36 And according to Rorke Bryan, a geographer at the University of Alberta, the $16.6 billion set aside in the NAWAPA proposal for land acquisition would hardly begin to address the relocation of the Trans Canada Highway, the trans‐Canadian rail systems, and the creation of 60,000 “discontented squatters in western Canada” that could easily assume “social significance of major proportions.”37 While never stated explicitly in the proposal, subsequent analysis of the plan suggests that there was no alternative to these events occurring if NAWAPA was to move forward. However, the inclination to halt the expanding search for technological advancement is “unnatural,” according to Naess: it is “against our active nature, our personal and cultural unfolding” to willingly lessen the drive towards ever greater technological marvels.38 Another factor making NAWAPA distinctive is that it stands as an example of Western society deciding upon an

34 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1991, 94. 35 Leiss, Domination of Nature (note 20), 121. 36 Richard Bocking, quoted in Canadian Water Resources Association. 25th Anniversary Conference. CWRA, 1973, 115‐116. 37 Bryan, Much is Taken, Much Remains (note 1), 155. 38 Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle (note 34), 94.

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“unnatural” course of action, willingly stepping back from growth. It suggests that after NAWAPA, the ends would have to justify the means in new ways. NAWAPA was the culmination of larger and larger efforts at technological advancement in the Southwest. But had it actually been approved, it is plausible to assume that the drive to improve upon the Alliance could not have lagged far behind. Indeed, this is James Scott’s fourth precaution for state planners: plan on human inventiveness.39 And in NAWAPA’s wake, there came a mass of alternative plans, each one attempting to address a particular failure in the NAWAPA scheme. There appears to have been little consideration as to whether such plans could be implemented, and whether they should be. To the state’s advantage, “when a so‐ called purely technical improvement is discovered,” according to Naess, it is “falsely assumed that the individual and society must regulate themselves accordingly.”40 Ultimately, for Sen. Frank Moss, the NAWAPA proposal was encouraging for its support of the idea that common sense and technical knowledge, if applied wisely, could assure a continuous and indefinite supply of water.41 For Moss, this meant that water diversion projects such as NAWAPA should progress at the expense of its ecological or conservation alternatives – and, tellingly, at the expense of Canada’s sovereign and territorial rights. 4.3 – Implications of NAWAPA for the Canadian nationstate If the timing was premature for NAWAPA, coming as it did on the heels of the contentious Columbia River Treaty, then the 1960s might as likely have been NAWAPA’s saving grace as it was the key to its rejection. In a decade of grandiose and visionary mega‐engineering projects, the stage was set for thinking to equal the magnitude of the problem being confronted, and NAWAPA fit perfectly into the high modernist American state’s planning for the future. Yet the rise of public participation as the “new religion” in Canada concurrent with the rise of the environmental movement indicates a Canadian society ready to confront anything that challenged the integrity of the landscape and the structure of the nation.

39 Scott, Seeing Like A State (note 18), 345. 40 Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle (note 34), 93. 41 Moss, The Water Crisis (note 9), 254.

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NAWAPA, many argued, threatened the territorial and sovereign integrity of the Canadian state, an accusation roundly denied by proponents such as Frank Moss, and insisted upon by opponents such as Gen. Andrew McNaughton. The Alliance struck many as yet another example of American continental imperialism, designed as it was to place Canadian resources and territory under control of an international body headquartered in America.42 Looking back, it is easy to comprehend why Canadians felt that the intensity of U.S. pressure demonstrated the extent of the American desire to secure a stable resource base. A few examples will suffice:

Congressman Jim Wright: “there is to the north of us a stupendous supply of water…which is simply going to waste. We need the water. We need to develop the means of getting that water.”

U.S. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development: “without NAWAPA the supply of water in Western United States will be substantially below the need.”

Sen. Frank Moss: “the countries of North America can hardly be any more separate in their utilization of the continent’s water resources than they are in the defense of the continent. There is complete military cooperation.”

Joseph Fisher (speaking at the Future Environments of North America conference on the topic of natural resources and economic development): there is a “need for recasting resource policies in a new mould of greater internal consistency and of greater harmony with the broader policies of foreign relations and defense.”43

These examples from American politicians and academics exemplify three broad categories of response to NAWAPA that many Canadians adopted to help oppose the plan within the context of Canada’s sovereign and territorial integrity. Firstly, arguments were made against the threat that NAWAPA posed to the sovereignty of the Canadian state. Second, many felt that NAWAPA would inevitably lead to increased political, economic, and scientific links between Canada and the United States. Lastly, those in opposition demonstrated the importance of understanding

42 Gen. A.G.L. McNaughton in Royal Society of Canada. Dolman, Claude E., ed. Water Resources of Canada. Symposia Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966. University of Toronto Press, 1967, 22‐23. 43 See Wright, The Coming Water Famine (note 9), 224; United States Senate. Committee on Public Works. Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development. A Summary of Water Resource Projects, Plans, and Studies Relating to the Western and Midwestern United States. Government Printing Office, 1966, 5; Moss, The Water Crisis (note 9), 252; and J. Fisher, quoted in The Conservation Foundation. Darling, F. Fraser and John P. Milton, eds. Future Environments of North America. The Natural History Press, 1965, 266.

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current and future water needs for the purposes of Canadian economic development: this was argued to be of critical value before agreeing to water diversion on the scale proposed by NAWAPA. For many concerned with the hidden implications of the Parsons plan, the displacement of Canadian sovereignty over both Canadian territory and resources was a tremendous blow to a nation already weakened as a result of the botched Columbia River Treaty. First amongst their concerns was the relabelling of territorial waters as “continental water,” thereby attaching a moniker that directly implied not only the right of American access, but the implicit requirement of Canadians to share what may have originated in their territory. In the addendum to the 1973 CWRA conference, Harold Pope found an often elusive middle ground in claiming that “although it is continental water, it is owned, not by everyone on the continent, but by the nation that is fortunate enough to possess that water.” 44 In Canada’s case, this right is divided between the federal and provincial governments. While “common law principles grant the provinces primary exploitative rights to [water] based on their ownership of the land underlying and adjacent to most of the freshwater resources within their borders,” Timothy Heinmiller notes that “the federal government has some proprietary rights over water resources in Canada, but these are limited to waters that are adjacent to and overlying federal lands such as national parks, military bases, and the northern territories.”45 The federal government has a stake in water export only inasmuch as it retains control over navigation and shipping (s.91 of the constitution), and authority over international treaties (s.132).46 Yet by engaging Americans in the field of property rights and ownership, Pope was insisting upon the sovereign right of Canadian provinces and the federal government to control the waters originating within Canada, adding that “no one has any legal right to any water that is entirely Canadian and that it must be

44 Harold Pope, quoted in quoted in the Addendum to the Canadian Water Resources Association. 25th Anniversary Conference. CWRA, 1973, 135. 45 Timothy B. Heinmiller, ‘Harmonization through Emulation: Canadian Federalism and Water Export Policy.’ Canadian Public Administration; (Winter). Vol. 46, No. 4, 2003, 498. 46 Heinmiller, Harmonization through Emulation (note 45), 498.

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the decision of our country as to whether we should or should not dispose of it.”47 Gen. Andrew McNaughton, far more vitriolic than Pope when addressing Senator Moss in 1967, put the issue this way: the promoters [of NAWAPA] would displace Canadian sovereignty over the national waters of Canada, and substitute therefore a diabolic thesis that all waters of North America became a shared resource, of which most will be drawn off for the benefit of the midwest and southwest regions of the United States, where existing desert areas will be made to bloom at the expense of development in Canada.48

McNaughton synthesized the threat to Canadian sovereignty, its origins, and those who he believed would benefit from plans like NAWAPA. He, and others like him, looked to the Columbia Treaty as an example of American capabilities in water governance, and the power over Canadian land and resources this would place in a nominally international board, controlled by Americans in America for American interests. In his 1973 report entitled AreaofOrigin Protectionism in Western Waters, Frank Quinn mused that it was possible to consider Canada in its entirety as an area of origin “vis‐à‐vis American diversion interests.”49 Quinn indicates that a by‐ product of the escalation of water diversion proposals to a continental dimension is “a change in political context as well as in scale.”50 The severity and tenacity with which some Canadians took up the defence of Canadian water against American intrusion may have had deeper roots in the insecurities of the time, such as the impact of foreign investment, environmental damage, and military alliances.51 Indeed, the political context was changing, and the second manner in which Canadians criticized NAWAPA reflected this growing sensitivity. Fears over the

47 Pope, CWRA Addendum (note 44), 135; Frank Quinn also echoed these sentiments in Frank J. Quinn. Ministry of the Environment. Inland Waters Directorate. Water Planning and Management Branch. AreaofOrigin Protectionism in Western Waters. Queen’s Printer, 1973, 61. 48 Gen A.G.L. McNaughton, Royal Society of Canada Address (note 42), 22. 49 Quinn, AreaofOrigin (note 47), 70. 50 Quinn, AreaofOrigin (note 47), 70. 51 Senator Frank Moss must have been sensitive to claims against the Alliance (or at least aware of the sensitivities of his audience) in speaking to the Royal Society of Canada where he specified that “the engineers, administrators, and parliamentarians who are scrutinizing the NAWAPA concept…are not conspiring to steal Canada’s water. Quoted in Frank Moss, Royal Society of Canada. Dolman, Claude E., ed. Water Resources of Canada. Symposia Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966. University of Toronto Press, 1967, 10. Italics added.

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growing interconnectedness between Canada and the United States, especially the sense of inequality permeating the relationship, ensured that any situation whereby Canada would increase its dependence on the United States would be highly scrutinized. NANR Minister Arthur Laing felt this to be the case even with regard to Canada simply acting as a land link between Alaska and the continental United States.52 Even without the supranational authority necessary to manage something as grand as NAWAPA, Rorke Bryan feared that the “extensive continental development of water resources would tie the United States and Canada more closely together than at present,” a situation that would “probably not be regarded as a desirable side effect by most Canadians.”53 Within Canada, the jurisdictional precariousness of water between federal and provincial responsibility suggested to flood‐control engineer Carson Templeton that any effort by the federal government to tax or otherwise regulate water use or export by the provinces could ultimately make the country unstable, a thought increasingly plausible given the unrest in Canada’s francophone province in the 1960s.54 Yet it is critical (if not obvious) to remember that before NAWAPA there existed an extensive series of economic, political, cultural, social, and environmental connections between the two nations, a situation that made requests for water hard to deny, yet difficult to accept. The atmosphere of distrust and uncertainty of American intentions was nowhere more clear than during question period in the Canadian House of Commons on September 5, 1966: Mr. Fulton (PC):…will the government make it clear that it will not enter into a discussion on the sharing of water on a continental basis until a national policy has been stated, detailed, and settled?

Mr. Pépin (LIB): That is the general position I took in Winnipeg [at a town hall meeting on the Nelson River water project], at which time the hon. member seemed to agree with it.

52 Laing, Water – The Ultimate Resource (note 2), 9. 53 Bryan, Much is Taken, Much Remains (note 1), 171. 54 Carson Templeton, ‘The Practical Constraints on Water Management,’ quoted in National Resource Conference. Sadler, Barry, ed. Water Policy for Western Canada: The Issue of the Eighties. University of Calgary Press, 1982, 130.

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Mr. Herridge (NDP):…Will the minister assure this house in a few brief words that the government of Canada will not undermine the desire of the Canadian people to protect their water resources?

Mr. Pépin: Quite right.

Mr. Aiken (PC):…In view of [U.S.] President Johnson’s recent statement that war or pure water appeared to be the world’s choice, does this government consider this philosophy of water or war has any application to Canada?

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. I do not believe this is a question that can be asked at this time.55

As unlikely as it seems in retrospect, there existed a real fear amongst some Canadian politicians to consider the threat of American force in acquiring water and the concurrent benefits water diversion represented to growth and life itself. Canada’s failure to consider this possibility, according to Progressive Conservative MP and future IJC commissioner E. Davie Fulton, “answers…the question of whether or not we [Canadians] slide down the slope called continentalism into the extinction of anything which might be called nationhood.”56 All hyperbole aside, Fulton and others were successful in framing the water export debate as central not merely to Canada’s future prosperity, but to the very future of the country. While Senator Moss attempted to demonstrate the economic and developmental benefits to be accrued by Canada as a source of water for American markets, he failed to account for the significant psychological role that water plays in the Canadian imagination. 57 Given B.C. Premier W.A.C. Bennett’s adage that “water is your heritage and you don’t sell your heritage,” it should be unsurprising that the Canadian criticisms of NAWAPA left the economic and legal realms of sovereignty to advocate for NAWAPA’s dismissal on purely emotional and nationalistic grounds.58

55 Canada. “United States Conference on Water for Peace.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 27th Parliament., 1st Session. Vol. VIII (September 6, 1966). Queen’s Printer, 1966, 8057. 56 E. Davie Fulton, “Supply – Mines and Technical Surveys.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 27th Parliament., 1st Session. Vol. II (March 3, 1966).Queen’s Printer, 1966, 2109. 57 Moss, The Water Crisis (note 9), 252. 58 Toronto Globe and Mail. U.S. Proposal to Share Canada’s Water Evokes Anger, but Need May Bring it About. July 23, 1965, B3.

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For Anthony Scott, the importance of the “emotional dimension” in opposing water export in Canada cannot be overestimated, and may in fact be the most critical factor.59 For Canadian nationalists, themselves working within a socially constructed framework of what Canada is, what it should be, and who it should be for, there is a problem Andrew Biro identifies as the “double bind.” While the traditional strength of nationalism has been “the extent to which the national territory is effectively brought under the control of the people and/or the state,” Biro argues that in Canada, this is not the case.60 He writes that “because of Canada’s particularly close relationship with – and its role as raw material exporter to – the world’s sole superpower, the taming of Canadian nature is often understood to be an American project.” Biro judges that “the index of Canadian national strength in this context becomes the extent to which American power is resisted or, in other words, the extent to which nature within Canada’s boundaries remains untamed.”61 It was with one eye to the past and one eye to the future that Canadians in the 1960s attempted to understand the vast potential they possessed for keeping Canadian resources under Canadian jurisdiction as a show of national strength. The third common form that nationalist criticisms of NAWAPA took was the importance of understanding current and future Canadian water needs. Negotiating away access to water was seen as tantamount to abandoning future development and growth in Canada. This was especially true of the Prairie region and the Canadian North that depended upon water for municipal, industrial, and agricultural growth. There has always existed a fine balance in Canada between what Justice Thomas Berger called in his inquiry into a northern gas pipeline “a particular idea of progress firmly embedded in our economic system and in our national consciousness” and a “strong identification with the values of the

59 Anthony Scott, Joe Olynyk and Steven Renzetti. Inquiry on Federal Water Policy. Research Paper #7. The Economics of Water Export Policy. Queen’s Printer, 1985, 40; also see Foster and Sewell, Water: The Emerging Crisis in Canada (note 9), 35. 60 Andrew Biro, ‘Half‐Empty of Half‐Full? Water Politics and the Canadian National Imaginary’ in Bakker, Kar en, ed. Eau Canada: The Future of Canada’s Water. UBC Press, 2007, 327. 61 Biro, HalfEmpty of HalfFull? (note 60), 328.

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wilderness and of the land itself.”62 Deeply engrained in the resource export debate is the question of future development, and where that development will take place. The disparities of NAWAPA’s benefits were laid out in the initial report produced by Parsons’ engineering firm, and are presented in Table 4.1. They lay bare what many Canadians could only assume – namely, that the vast majority of benefits in terms of acre‐feet made available annually, kilowatt energy produced per year, and increases in irrigable land were the primary possessions of the United States. Frank Moss claimed to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966 that NAWAPA may never need to come to fruition if pollution clean‐up and abatement should help reduce their dependence on foreign water sources, though he remained sceptical that pollution clean‐up and conservation efforts should have a great effect on water availability.63 On a visit to Canada in the same year, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall argued that the clean‐up of pollution in American water systems would provide additional water in the Southwest, though he indicated that it was only a matter of time before Canada and the United States would have to seriously discuss the sharing of continental water resources. “This type of effort,” Udall claimed, “will defer the day before we will have to ask the big questions nation to nation.”64 However, with NAWAPA merely under consideration, the American commitment to conservation and pollution abatement seemed disingenuous to many Canadians.

Water made Available % of Tota l Power Produced % of Tota l Increase in irrig able land (acre‐feet annually) (per country) (KW annually) (per country) (acres) Canada 22,000,000 17.6% 30,000,000 42.8% N/A United States 78,000,000 62.4% 38,000,000 54.2% 40,000,000 Mexico 25,000,000 20% 2,000,000 0.03% X 3 1964 total acres Total 125,000,000 ‐ ‐ ‐ 70,000,000 ‐ ‐ ‐ ‐ ‐ ‐ Table 4.1. NAWAPA benefits by Country . (Source: Ralph M. Parsons Company, NAWAPA: North American Water and Power Alliance, Brochure 606293419, 1964)

Frank Quinn and Roy Tinney from EMR’s Policy and Planning Branch pointed out the hollowness of American claims to Canadian water at the 1969 Arid Lands in

62 Justice Thomas R. Berger, Ministry of Supply and Services Canada. Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland. Queen’s Printer, 1976, 29. 63 Frank Moss, Royal Society of Canada. Dolman, Claude E., ed. Water Resources of Canada. Symposia Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1966. University of Toronto Press, 1967, 10. 64 Stuart Udall, quoted in Toronto Globe and Mail. Clean U.S. Water First Step – Udall. June 24, 1966.

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Perspective conference in Arizona. They wryly asked their American counterparts why “better‐watered regions within the United States are not more eager to share their supplies…if water importation into arid lands is as obviously beneficial as many promoters would have us believe.”65 In addition to American hesitation to divert water within the United States to support the arid Southwest (including opposition from the Pacific Northwest states of Washington and Oregon to supply water from the Columbia River), there was also pressure on Canadians to view providing water to America as a moral obligation, something good neighbours should feel compelled to do. Despite members of the Canadian press arguing that “there is no need to inject neighbourly sentiment into the formulation of our [water] policy,” prominent Americans thought otherwise.66 At a speech in Billings, Montana in 1965, Frank Moss angered many Canadians by questioning “the right of one section of a country – or one section of a continent – to waste water – to allow vast quantities of it to run away to the sea unused while other sections do not have enough to meet the requirements of their growing populations.”67 Stewart Udall also hinted at this moral obligation by suggesting that “it would be unfortunate if any region took the attitude [that] it would rather let its water resources flow unused into the sea rather than make them available to others,” a subtle jab at the Canadian reluctance to negotiate the export of “wasted” water.68 This idea of moral obligation, Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys Jean‐ Luc Pépin claimed, was ridiculous. Several years before Quinn and Tinney spoke in Arizona, Pépin confirmed the feelings of many north of the border, claiming that “Canadians can hardly be expected to feel morally bound to provide water for the opening of arid areas in the United States” without demonstrated humanitarian need. In a similar vein, Pépin argued, “Americans cannot be expected to feel morally

65 Roy Tinney and Frank Quinn, quoted in American Association for the Advancement of Science. McGinnies, William G. and Bram J. Goldman, eds. Arid Lands in Perspective: Including AAS Papers on Water Importation Into Arid Lands. University of Arizona Press, 1969, 412. 66 Calgary Albertan. October 7, 1965; also see Herbert W. Herridge, “The Address ‐ Mr. Herridge.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 27th Parliament., 1st Session. Vol. I (January 31, 1966). Queen’s Printer, 1966, 460. 67 American Statesman. Experts Eye Water in North. October 3, 1966. 68 Toronto Globe and Mail. U.S. Proposal to Share Canada’s Water Evokes Anger, but Need May Bring it About. July 23, 1965, B3.

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bound to supply capital for the development of the Canadian north.”69 Yet in the 1960s there was real concern in some Canadian circles that the continued sell‐out of Canadian resources, especially freshwater resources so high in demand, would seriously hinder any future development ambitions in Canada. The opinions of John Diefenbaker seem contradictory in retrospect in speaking of his grand “Northern Vision” for developing the Canadian north while signing the Columbia River Treaty in January 1961. In fact, eight years after Diefenbaker signed the treaty, the Canada Water Act (1969) of Pierre Trudeau’s government still reflected an interest in pollution clean‐up and abatement without a single reference to the issue of water export. This omission, according to Quinn, was “probably as good an indication as exists of how unprepared and indisposed the Canadian people and their government are to make any decision on this…subject.”70 And despite federal inquiries and increased populations and pollution, Canada remains no closer to achieving a coherent federal water policy today than the country was in 1969. The growing fear that Canada might concede its water resources wholesale to the United States, rather than the piecemeal approach taken with the Columbia River Treaty, prompted many to stress the unknowns of the NAWAPA plan – not only the minutiae of the plan itself, but the unforeseen environmental, political, and economic impacts that may accompany it. Tinney and Quinn argued in 1969 that none of the proposals for large‐scale water diversion from Canada to the United States provided all the information necessary for the Canadian public to make an informed decision. “These engineering schemes,” they argued, “are privately sponsored; whether they provide the most efficient system for economic growth, allow for its equitable distribution inter‐regionally and internationally, and protect environmental qualities for other kinds of human fulfillment, remains unknown.”71

69 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources fonds, RG 21, Accession 1990‐91/030, FA 21‐15, Communications Branch ‐ Press Releases and Speeches, 1950‐ 1987, “Statement by the Honourable Jean‐Luc Pépin, Minister of Mines and technical Surveys, Prepared for a panel discussion on ‘WATER RESOURCES – A COVETED ASSET, NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONAL’ at the Canadian Bar Ass ociation Convention, Winnipeg, Manitoba.” Box 3, #71‐28. Ottawa, 1966, 3. 70 Quinn, AreaofOrigin (note 47), 68. 71 Tinney and Quinn, Arid Lands in Perspective (note 65), 412.

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Further study, they claimed, was needed before any future plan for water diversion would be palatable to the Canadian public. Yet as Philip Sykes indicates, while the need for an inventory of Canadian water resources was necessary, the studies launched in the 1960s reflected the relative ignorance of the Canadian people and their governments in the aftermath of the Columbia Treaty.72 After Columbia, as it was after NAWAPA, there appeared to be a genuine desire to learn more about Canadian water resources, how they fit into the larger picture of Canadian resource export, and how NAWAPA had shifted the scale of water diversion away from mega‐ projects for the foreseeable future. But for Dr. Robert Newbury, a civil engineer at the University of Manitoba, the question he attempted to answer at the Canadian Water Resources Association conference in 1973 was not solely about water export or diversion – just as for Justice Berger, the issue was not simply a matter of the feasibility of a natural gas energy corridor through the Mackenzie Valley. Both men saw that the more fundamental questions behind these proposals hinted at what kind of nation Canadians wanted by the millennium, and what the future of the North and its people would be.73 “Once Canada has lost the ability to develop along its water courses,” Sykes argued, “it will be, in an irreversible sense, a colony rather than a nation.”74 And for Sykes, there could be no question that NAWAPA would severely limit the range of future development possible within Canada after control of so vital a resource was effectively given to America. 4.4 – Water as Resource II: The Context of Canadian Export On the issue of American ownership of Canadian resources, Philip Sykes and James Laxer were peas in a pod. Resource extraction and export has typically been for the benefit of a colonial power in Canada’s history, an idea that in itself is nothing new.75 What changed in the 1960s for Canada was that, having achieved independence lo ng before the centennial year of 1967, the country was prepared

72 Philip Sykes, Sellout: The Giveaway of Canada’s Energy Resources. Hurtig Publishers, 1973, 71; Pope, CWRA Addendum (note 44), 136. 73 Robert Newb ury, quoted in Canadian Water Resources Association. 25th Anniversary Conference. CWRA, 1973 , 109; B erger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland (note 62), 1. 74 Sykes, Sellout (note 72), 78. 75 Biro, HalfEmpty of HalfFull? (note 60), 321‐334.

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through its role as resource hinterland to the United States to transition towards political and social disintegration.76 NAWAPA and other continental projects such as the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline and the proposed continental energy deal between Canada and the United States helped solidify a form of leftist nationalism in Canada that found its voice in the 1960s, largely in opposition to increased linkages with the United States. Left‐leaning opponents of the Alliance such as Laxer, Sykes, and Abraham Rotstein sought to protect Canada from overt American intervention, expansion, or unnecessary foreign control over Canadian businesses and resources. In this limited sense, they shared something in common with conservative Canadian philosopher George Grant. Many of the arguments that Laxer made in the early 1970s against a continental energy deal with the United States are applicable to what a similar continental water proposal such as NAWAPA would have entailed: short‐term benefits and long‐term damage; promoting the idea of Canada as a resource hinterland to the United States; an increased commitment to dependency on American capital; and a severely degraded natural environment.77 While this may be seen as an example of one Canadian internalizing George Grant’s Lament for a Nation thesis that prophesized the end of Canada as a nation unless the boundaries between Canada and the United States were maintained, not all Canadians saw the evolving resource relationship with the United States in such stark terms. Indeed, the “depletion of a resource was rational so long as the resource remained abundant,” and to many observers, water was more abundant in Canada than in any other nation in the world.78 There were those in Canada who shared with Senator Moss a similar faith in the transformative power of NAWAPA to bring wealth and development to sparsely populated and industrialized regions of the country. There were those who also saw investment opportunities and wealth being wasted as water flowed uselessly to the sea, and felt that Canada was foolish to under‐utilize so valuable a commodity when

76 James Laxer. The Energy Poker Game: The Politics of the Continental Resource Deal, New Press, 1970, 15. 77 Laxer, The Energy Poker Game (note 76), 22‐23. 78 Harvey, Geography of Difference (note 22), 124‐125.

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a massive market for it existed with Canada’s largest trading partner. In the years after the Alliance was first proposed, a plethora of alternative plans emerged, almost all of them attempting to mimic NAWAPA’s scope while fixing upon a specific design flaw in the Parsons’ plan. Interestingly, many of these plans originated in Canada. E. Kuiper of the University of Manitoba developed a plan that depended in large measure on pre‐existing natural waterways to reduce the cost of engineering concrete pathways. CeNAWP was a plan by E. Roy Tinney, one‐time employee of the Ministry of the Environment, to address what he felt were the often unnecessary environmental disruptions inherent in the NAWAPA proposal. Thomas Kierans, an engineer at the University of Sudbury, made his mark on large‐scale water diversion with his Great Replenishment and Northern Lakes Development Canal (GRAND). The GRAND Canal was developed to deal with fluctuating water levels in the Great Lakes and was closely linked to hydro‐electric power projects around James Bay.79 Large‐scale engineering proposals were not confined to academia. Quinn indicates that “in 1965, the annual report of the Alberta Water Resources Branch ridiculed the private sector NAWAPA scheme and announced PRIME, the Branch’s own elaborate plan for diverting northern rivers into the southern part of the province.”80 Manitoba’s Minister of Agriculture, Harry Enns, enthusiastically endorsed Tinney’s CeNAWP plan in 1968 while questioning water’s special status. “For some reason or another, people get emotional about water,” Enns argued, “yet it’s a renewable resource! Oil isn’t, yet nobody gets excited about exporting oil!”81 Enns added that “we could be North America’s water tap,” as if sustaining Canada’s tradition of drawing water was somehow noble.82 Jack Davis was an ardent supporter of large‐scale water schemes, though his understanding of the political sensitivity of water in Canada led him to praise these projects in less than direct terms. Yet Davis spoke of large‐scale water projects

79 For an extensive breakdown of alternative plans to the Alliance, see Bryan, Much is Taken, Much Remains (note 1), 158‐167. 80 Frank J. Quinn, Water Diversion, Export and CanadaUS Relations: A Brief History. Paper presented to the Program on Water Issues at the Munk Centre for International Relations. University of Toronto, 2007, 7. 81 Edmonton Journal. Manitoba Has Hopes for its Cool, Clear Gold. April 23, 1968. 82 Edmonton Journal. Manitoba Has Hopes for its Cool, Clear Gold (note 81).

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above and beyond capital gains: if his myriad of speeches and statements in the House of Commons are to be taken as any indication of how he truly felt, then Davis’s opinions can be said to have embodied all of the grandeur of high modernist water projects, equal to Senator Moss or Congressman Wright in this limited sense. One example lies in a speech Davis delivered to the Canadian Construction Association in New Brunswick in June 1966, and it is worth quoting at length: I hope to test your imagination. I want you to look beyond this power site or that. I want you to think in terms of entire river basins. Indeed, I want you to look beyond the mountains and to envisage schemes for diversion of water and the long distance transmission of hydro electric power which are not only regional but national in scope. Our mountains and our valleys, in other words, no longer restrict our minds. We will vault over them or tunnel through them. Man‐made boundaries will, meanwhile, fade into the background. This massive task of bending nature to our will should not be too difficult. Your industry has been doing this for years. And I know it will continue to keep Canada in the vanguard of project pioneers the world over.83

Davis’s high modernist, almost romantic musings on water diversion, the easy bending of nature to meet human needs, the fading of “man‐made boundaries,” and the national scope of such projects might have frightened many Canadians had they known such politicians had power in Ottawa. Davis, “an informed Canadian” according to Senator Moss, represents a small but powerful group of advocates in Canada who shared with Moss and others an ardent desire to see Canada export water to the United States by bending nature to human will.84 In the process, the slow erasure of the political boundaries of the continent would send Canada further into the arms of the United States. Thus there were many Canadians in academia and government who supported the NAWAPA proposal in theory, if not specifically. Many found fault with various aspects of the plan and proposed alternatives of their own, though all accepted the basic tenets of the Alliance: that large‐scale water diversion from

83 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources fonds, RG 21, Accession 1990‐91/030, FA 21‐15, Communications Branch ‐ Press Releases and Speeches, 1950‐ 1987, “Hydro Power and the Future by Jack Davis, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys, delivered at the Annual Summer Meeting of the Canadian Construction Association.” Box 3, #71‐28. Ottawa – June 27, 1966, 1. 84 Moss, The Water Crisis (note 9), 6.

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Canada to the United States in some form was a feasible, logical, and lucrative venture for the people of Canada to undertake. Lost on many Canadians in the NAWAPA debate was the simple fact that water diversions from Canada to the United States were already occurring, and therefore that the principle of water export to America had already been accepted. Small‐scale diversions from Coutts, Alberta to Sweetgrass, Montana, and the Canadian acquiescence of 90 cubic metres per second withdrawal from Lake Michigan to assist in Chicago’s sewage treatment are only two examples of water withdrawals between Canada and the United States that had been in place for decades. What had changed in the 1960s was the scale of such proposals.85 As Anthony Scott indicates, “Canada has not failed to export its natural resource commodities – ranging from renewable resources such as grain and lumber to non‐ renewable, strategically important resources such as oil and natural gas – when the opportunity presented itself.”86 In fact, Sen. Moss argued at his Royal Society of Canada debate with Gen. McNaughton that Americans had heard Canadian posturing against resource export in the past regarding natural gas – which now formed a substantial revenue base for Canada.87 Why, Moss wondered, should water export by classified differently than natural gas? So why was water export different? If “resources can be defined only in relationship to the mode of production which seeks to make use of them and which simultaneously ‘produces’ them through both the physical and mental activity of the users,” as Harvey claimed, and if water is “produced” through the same process that other resources are, why the hesitation to export water? 88 Before we can adequately address this question, it may well be worth asking if water actually has been considered or treated differently than other resources by the Canadian public. Successive Prime Ministers in Canada from John Diefenbaker to Pierre Trudeau had shown a willingness to consider large‐scale water export should the circumstances

85 Foster and Sewell, Water: The Emerging Crisis in Canada (note 9), 30. 86 Scott, The Economics of Water Export Policy (note 59), 39. 87 A.E. Palmer, ‘U.S. Senator Pleads for NAWAPA Study.’ Reclamation; September. Vol. VI, No. 2, 1966, 3. 88 David Harvey, quoted in Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (note 19), 7.

- 116 - prove lucrative enough, a tradition carried into the 1990s by Brian Mulroney. Despite this, and despite the hazards of drawing conclusions across the provinces with competing regional attitudes and interests, Canadians in the 1960s were not convinced that something like NAWAPA was necessary. This is not to suggest that opposition to water export automatically denotes a personal or deeper meaning for water in the hearts and minds of a majority of Canadians, yet the fact that oil and gas export continued throughout this era, and still does while large‐scale water diversion was effectively halted after the Alliance passed out of fashion, suggests that the latter has a greater resonance in the national imagination. Ideas such as NAWAPA, when they emerge and threaten the often taken‐for‐ granted perception of freshwater’s availability, possess the scale and power to help influence and inform Canadians sense of water’s centrality to their collective heritage. While the importance of U.S. expansionism in turning to Canada as a subsequent source of natural resources cannot be underestimated, the important place of water in the Canadian psyche should not be downplayed as a factor in NAWAPA’s defeat. There have been three key factors in Canadian hesitation towards large‐scale water export. Firstly, scale has been a major contributing aspect. Since the principle of water export to the United States had already been accepted by 1964 when NAWAPA was first proposed, clearly Canadians were not taking umbrage with the principle of water export so much as the gargantuan size of the proposal. As Sykes claims, “it was too monstrous to be palatable in Canada,” a statement further proven by the number of unknowns that accompanied the plan. 89 Without recourse to reversibility, for Canadians to have embraced NAWAPA would have required a massive leap of faith. Interestingly, the scale of the NAWAPA transfer was matched later only by the proposal to create an energy corridor for the transport of natural gas through the Mackenzie Valley to the United States. Like NAWAPA, the plan was scuttled in 1976 as a result of the best‐selling Berger Inquiry that outlined the

89 Sykes, Sellout (note 72), 70.

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devastating impacts it would have on the Native populations and natural environment of the north. Secondly, as Biro argues, “resistance [to water export] may in fact be impelled as much by an anxiety about the future as by the historical legacy of national identity.”90 The number of unknowns facing the Canadian government regarding water resources in 1964 was vast, such that to contemplate negotiating away resources whose extent was largely unidentified made little sense from a political, ecological, or economic perspective. NANR Minister Arthur Laing was adamant that Canada’s water resources would never become a “badge of bondage” with the United States, yet in 1964 he remained “quite certain that in the years ahead…we will look upon our water resources as a prime element in negotiation with our United States friends.”91 Laing was unclear as to what water may figure prominently in the negotiation of, though there are many who argue that decades later, water figured significantly as a negotiating tool in the NAFTA trade agreement.92 With water so closely tied to future development and economic prosperity through the energy, industrial, and agricultural sectors, any loss of control over Canadian water resources was tantamount to losing control over Canada’s future. Speaking of Canada’s burgeoning resource industry, Gen. McNaughton argued that “the NAWAPA promoters would move all of this out of Canada – the people, the industry, the water. It can only be described as madness to believe that Canada has surplus water in an area [the North] that is so obviously earmarked for major resource development.”93 Development, McNaughton maintained, must be regulated with the interests of Canadians first, and to their maximum benefit.

90 Andrew Biro, ‘Wet Dreams: Ideology and the Debate over Canadian Water Exports.’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; December, 2002. Vol. 13, No. 4, 41. 91 Arthur Laing, “Water Resources. Consideration of Canadian Requirements in Sales to U.S.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 26th Parliament. 2nd Session. Vol. VII (September 2, 1964). Queen’s Printer, 1964, 7575‐7576. 92 See Wendy Holm, ed., Water and Free Trade: The Mulroney Government's Agenda for Canada's Most Precious Resource. J. Lorimer, 1988. 93 Gen A.G.L. McNaughton, Royal Society of Canada Address (note 43), 19.

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Lastly, and most importantly, water may not have been produced through the same “physical and mental activity of the users” as oil, timber, grain, or natural gas. But its place within the national consciousness as part of Canada’s heritage has granted water a special status that Anthony Scott argues “had an important impact on government water export policies.”94 While not everyone agrees that this special relationship is sensible, let alone valuable to Canadians, defence of Canadian water has become tantamount to a defence of Canada in ways that the exploitation and export of other resources in the 1960s and 1970s could not match, though oil in the 1970s as much as in contemporary Alberta is the exception to the rule. This view – that water’s importance in Canada has spawned a culture “rich in water imagery” – fits conveniently, according to Biro, with “a Canadian nationalism defined against the modern, hydrologically engineered (nature‐dominating, imperialist) society to the south.”95 Water, in this sense, has become a combatant in the effort to keep American manifest destiny in check by fighting against the grain of “continentally unifying natural features.”96 It was coupled with sovereignty to more effectively resist American expansionism. Canadians were not completely opposed to water diversion to the United States. But as the scale of both water diversion and the threat it posed to Canadian territorial and political sovereignty increased in the 1960s, many nationalists on the political left (and some on the political right) in Canada found in water specifically and energy resources more broadly an effective conduit to express their concern over an expanding American influence in North America. Not only was this defence of water a defence of Canada, but it was put to work in reinforcing important distinctions between Canada and the United States as separate and distinct nation‐states.

94 Scott, The Economics of Water Export Policy (note 59), 39. 95 Biro, HalfEmpty of HalfFull? (note 60), 323. 96 Biro, HalfEmpty of HalfFull? (note 60), 322; Vincent Massey provides an interesting ‐ though dated ‐ check to this. Arguing in 1948, Massey maintained that “we know our sovereign independence in real, final and complete.” For Massey, if there be any lingering feelings of colonial subordination towards Great Britain, or, increasingly, the United States, “we ourselves are responsible and no one else.” Despite the simplicity of his ‘tough‐love’ approach, Massey’s statement remains quite accurate. Slightly over a decade later it would be Canadian uncertainly about water resources and an inability to formulate a national water policy that would lead to a debate over NAWAPA. See Vincent Massey, On Being Canadian. J.M. Dent and Sons (Canada) Limited, 1948, 9.

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Conclusion “Canada seems to be no more organized today than it was 20 years ago when massive diversion schemes (on paper) created a ‘crisis’ atmosphere.” – Ontario Society for Environmental Management

No single factor was responsible for NAWAPA’s failure. The Alliance still presently draws support from various online interest groups who theorize about what contemporary form the plan could take.1 The appeal of a “jet‐age” type of thinking still resonates strongly today, and the allure of a fix‐all plan such as NAWAPA remains an enticing option for those concerned more with meeting Southwestern water needs than the preservation of the North American environment. Today, however, the discussion is tempered with a stronger environmentalist element. Yet at its core, the debate over water withdrawals specifically and resource extraction and use more broadly remains one caught in the binary between conservation and preservation. Interestingly, the benefits of large‐ scale water diversion from Canada to the United States – specifically NAWAPA and the GRAND Canal plan – were still being seriously discussed as recently as 1985 by Robert Bourassa, Premier of Quebec from 1970 to 1976 and 1985 to 1994. He argued in his 1985 book Power from the North that “it would be essential that any serious proposal satisfy strict environmental standards,” thereby dismissing NAWAPA in favour of Thomas Kierans’ GRAND Canal scheme and its increased awareness of environmental disruptions.2 Bourassa went on to outline the economic benefits to be accrued by Quebec and Canada, so much so that for a time in the 1980s, he had the support of Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney for examining the environmental feasibility of dyking James Bay to create a freshwater lake at the southern tip of Hudson Bay.3

1 For examples of those who continue to advocate for NAWAPA, see the San Jose State University Department of Economics at San Jose State University Department of Economics. Thayer Watkins, The North American Water and Power Alliance. Accessed August 5, 2009, http://www.applet‐ magic.com/NAWAPA.htm; the opinions of Michael E. Campana at Oregon State University at Oregon State University. Canadian Water Exports: Will NAWAPA Return? January 25, 2008. Accessed August 5, 2009, http://aquadoc.typepad.com/waterwired/2008/01/kennedy‐to‐cana.html; and Sun Belt Water Inc. Water – The World Looks to Canada. Accessed August 5, 2009, http://www.sunbeltwater.com/. 2 Robert Bourassa, Power from the North. Prentice‐Hall Canada Inc., 1985, 146. 3 Bourassa, Power from the North (note 2), 148‐149.

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The scale of NAWAPA and other plans like it has ensured that when water diversion between Canada and the United States is discussed, the Alliance is inevitably referenced, even if only as an example of the detachment between drafting and reality. In a 2007 report on water diversion and export between Canada and the United States presented to the Program on Water Issues (POWI) at the University of Toronto, Frank Quinn still acknowledged the role of NAWAPA and other mega‐projects in water’s North American history, though he suggested that their lack of government support reduced them to “basically nothing more than lines on a map.”4 Yet perhaps Quinn goes too far in dismissing NAWAPA and other massive North American water diversion projects that originated in the mid‐1960s. The unique ways in which we study failures should not be dismissed so flippantly. Rather, the very fact that NAWAPA did not materialize yet played such an important role in shifting the scope and scale of water diversion and export projects in North America makes it something deserving of further study. Failed projects often fail for important reasons, and we dismiss those reasons – and what they can teach society about how best to exist in the world – at our peril. While MTS Minister Jean‐Luc Pépin felt the issue of water export to be “a very hypothetical question,” studying NAWAPA has value beyond what it and other similar plans reflect of attitudes towards water and nature in the 1960s.5 As examples of what large‐scale water engineering would encompass, they highlighted – in most cases quite accidentally – the violence and danger that such human interventions could have upon the natural world. They demonstrated the extent to which North Americans would have to accept the re‐engineering of their physical environments in order to maintain rather unsustainable lifestyles. These high modernist plans presented a future for North America that was overwhelmingly

4 Frank J. Quinn, Water Diversion, Export and CanadaUS Relations: A Brief History. Paper presented to the Program on Water Issues at the Munk Centre for International Relations. University of Toronto, August 2007, 2. 5 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources fonds, RG 21, Accession 1990‐91/030, FA 21‐15, Communications Branch ‐ Press Releases and Speeches, 1950‐ 1987, “Water Management and Pollution by Hon. Jean‐Luc Pépin, Statement to the Conservation Council of Ontario,” Box 3, #71‐28 – Ottawa, May 26, 1966, 2.

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rejected, a remarkable feat considering the massive scale of concurrent projects such as the England‐France Chunnel, the damming of the Volga River, the Columbia River system and St. Lawrence Seaway, and the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Additionally, in exposing the excesses of high modernist state planning with regard to water projects, NAWAPA proved to be a turning point in the acceptance of great projects of nation‐building that required massive intervention into the natural world. The scale of water diversion so shifted from large‐scale to small‐scale in the wake of the Alliance that neither NAWAPA nor any of its subsequent variations could gain public acceptance or government support. One of the principle reasons for NAWAPA’s failure was its astronomical expense. At $100 billion dollars (U.S.) in 1964 dollars, it was seen as simply too costly for something so risky. And as Senator Moss attempted to drum up support for the plan in speaking tours across Canada and the American Southwest after 1964, the price of the proposal continued to increase. A decade later, the new price‐ tag was well over $200 billion and climbing increasingly beyond the means of those who would finance it. Another critical factor was the lack of government support. Senator Moss was not entirely alone in his desire to see the Alliance materialize, but without official support from Washington to pressure the Canadian federal government to consider the plan or provide money to finance the feasibility studies, NAWAPA could not move forward. Additionally, the sheer scale of the Alliance cannot be overestimated as a factor in its failure. While “jet‐age” type of thinking may have been popular in the 1960s in North America, NAWAPA seems to have crossed a line of acceptability, becoming a bridge too far in the socio‐engineering of the natural world. After having extensively studied NAWAPA and the varied responses to the proposal, it has become clear to me that an apparent distinction was missing between what could be accomplished by humans in the natural world and what should be created. Those who adopted the attitude that any possible interventions into the natural world must instinctively be implemented would have done well to recall Kate Soper’s notion of “nature in the realist sense”: that

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regardless of what could be created, “however Promethean in ambition,” nature will always be stronger than anything humanity mobilizes to transform it.6 We must also consider what Anthony Scott termed the “emotional dimension” to debates over water in Canada.7 It is vital to include national resentment towards the proposal – in the context of American ownership of Canadian resources – for understanding the unique position that water enjoys in the Canadian psyche, and the role this played in rejecting the Alliance. There was only a small window of opportunity in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North America whereby something as grandiose as NAWAPA could have been proposed without immediate dismissal. From the advent of the high modernist state to the increasing awareness of ecological and environmental destruction, this moment in time also coincided with a decade of – typically leftist – nationalist fervour and growing resentment in Canada of linkages with the United States. NAWAPA would have proved the most physical linkage of all. Tied to this is the environmental destruction the Alliance would have caused, a topic that received scant attention from media and academic sources. The magnitude of ecological damage can only be estimated, while the radical alteration of the landscape on such a scale would have had massive impacts upon the climate and physical foundation of the continent through the accumulated weight of water stored in the 500‐mile long Rocky Mountain Trench. I have argued that NAWAPA provided an excellent opportunity for those in the burgeoning environmental movement and a growing cohort of leftist nationalists to cut their teeth on the issues of violent human intervention into the natural world and the continued influence of foreign capital on Canadian resources, respectively. While neither concern was entirely new, the sheer scale of the Alliance escalated the palpable anxiety many in Canada felt. Without knowing it, many Canadians (and Americans opposed to the Alliance) had argued against NAWAPA within the framework of Robert Goodin’s

6 Kate Soper, “Nature/‘nature’” in Robertson, George, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, and Tim Putnam, eds. FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture. Routledge, 1996, 31. 7 Anthony Scott, Joe Olynyk and Steven Renzetti. Inquiry on Federal Water Policy. Research Paper #7. The Economics of Water Export Policy. Queen’s Printer, 1985, 39.

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green theory of value. Realizing that the natural world had value above and beyond how humans were willing to price it, the pressure to prove the commercial value of nature was turned on its head. Instead, the expectation was placed on those in power who sought to divert Canadian waters south to demonstrate why natural worth was valued less than capitalist gain. Finally, we must consider that the extent of the water “crisis” in the American Southwest was grossly exaggerated. This embellishment helped ensure that while Senator Moss and Congressman Wright felt an immediacy to the water crisis in the American Southwest, the dire world of drought and stunted regional development they touted as the alternative to NAWAPA was never the case. Alternatives to the large‐scale diversion of water from Alaska and the Yukon thousands of miles south to northern Mexico were never sufficiently examined by the drafters of the plan, and in the limited discussion of alternatives, most were either deemed too expensive (such as desalinization), or insufficient to meet the demands of the arid Southwest (such as conservation). The Alliance also emphasized the arguable hollowness of some high modernist state planning efforts, allowing North Americans to question the use of the capitalist interests of the state in preserving the state’s territorial and environmental integrity. After NAWAPA, the allure of high modernist water diversion plans dwindled. In the opposition to the plan, nature was finally recognized as an active agent worthy of consideration in any like‐minded future schemes . The crucial recognition that such plans, when drafted, are intended for realization within the natural world, and that nature must never be lost in discussions over water export or diversion, owes something to the debate over the North American Water and Power Alliance. That the “crisis” was also less pronounced than NAWAPA’s proponents believed has been made additionally clear by the continued growth of the Southwest in the years after the proposal went out of style. The reluctance of government officials advocating for long‐distance water diversion to encourage conservation and change in the pattern of lifestyles, in addition to the inability to question the cult of growth, demonstrates the influence of high modernist planning

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on water projects at the time. As Moss argued in The Water Crisis, “make no little plans.”8 After 1973, the urgency of water export from Canada to the United States dropped precipitously. Part of the reason for this is described by geographer Frédéric Lasserre, who argued in 2007 that Canada, with one‐tenth the population of the United States, is actually a much larger domestic water diverter than America. He notes the key difference is that the scale has shifted from the large‐scale diversions envisioned in the 1960s to a “multiplication of smaller, shorter diversions…all being perfectly justifiable, but the sum of which could amount to a large diversion.”9 Canada’s larger volume of domestic diversions has created a debate that Lasserre fears will be as “politically contentious as is the debate over exports to our neighbour to the south,” in addition to making Canada’s opposition to water export less defensible. 10 NAWAPA helped convince most water engineers in Canada and the United States that smaller‐scale domestic withdrawals or diversions were not only more economically feasible, but also that gaining public acceptance for these was also much easier despite the great potential for environmental disruption.11 Debate over the Alliance also indicated that while the divide between first and second nature can be made greater through instituting such plans as NAWAPA, for example, there is no reason to assume that this should be so. The crucial emphasis on smaller‐scale, inter‐basin withdrawals can also be seen as an effort to lessen the divide between first and second natures, or at least to make the rift no wider, as NAWAPA would surely have done. The debate about transboundary and domestic inter‐basin freshwater diversion in Canada is unlikely to subside in the near future, nor should it. The myth of Canada’s superabundance of water continues to colour all discussions of Canadian water resources, and the topic of export specifically. “With only 0.6 per cent of the world’s population we estimate that we have over one quarter of the

8 Frank Moss, Frank E. The Water Crisis. Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1967; this caption is the title of his chapter on NAWAPA. 9 Frederic Lasserre, ‘Drawers of Water: Water Diversions in Canada and Beyond’ in Bakker, Karen, ed. Eau Canada: The Future of Canada’s Water. UBC Press, 2007, 156‐157. 10 Lasserre, Drawers of Water (note 9), 151, 160. 11 Lasserre, Drawers of Water (note 9), 157.

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world’s fresh, liquid, surface water,” argued NANR Minister Arthur Laing in April 1965, a position that many subsequent generations of engineers and academics have fought to dispel.12 Canada’s historic lack of federal water policies has recently been overcome in a truly Canadian fashion by what Timothy Heinmiller termed “policy emulation,” a system whereby provinces adopt a similar policy towards water and water export, creating a uniformity of legislation without overstepping jurisdictional boundaries or infringing upon NAFTA obligations.13 “By 2002,” he indicated, “all of the sovereign jurisdictions in Canada but New Brunswick had formed water export policies.”14 This does not preclude the need for further study of Canada’s water reserves, and their myriad of often competing uses. MTS Minister Jean‐Luc Pépin argued as far back as 1966 that “‘national’ water legislation could only result from the integration of federal and provincial statutes,” and that the federal government must take a leadership role in bringing this legislative shift about.15 In 1964, Liberal MP and future Prime Minister John Turner touched on the importance of creating a substantial national water policy, a “priority which must occupy us for the next generation.”16 Coincidentally, Turner’s estimate was conservative, as ensuing generations continue to formulate water policies that strike appropriate balances between jurisdictions. EMR Minister J.J. Greene pointed out the difficulties in

12 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, C.O.P. CA.R. 64, “Water ‐ The Ultimate Resource: An Address by the Honourable Arthur Laing, Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources, at a luncheon of the Pacific Northwest Trade Association, Portland, Oregon, April 12, 1965.” Ottawa, Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 1965, 4; also see John B. Sprague, ‘Great Wet North? Canada’s Myth of Water Abundance’ in Bakker, Karen, ed. Eau Canada: The Future of Canada’s Water. UBC Press, 2007, pp. 23‐36 for more on the continued strength of the abundance myth. 13 Timothy B. Heinmiller, ‘Harmonization through Emulation: Canadian Federalism and Water Export Policy.’ Canadian Public Administration; (Winter). Vol. 46, No. 4, 2003, 508. 14 Heinmiller, ‘Harmonization through Emulation’ (note 13), 508. 15 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources fonds, RG 21, Accession 1990‐91/030, FA 21‐15, Communications Branch ‐ Press Releases and Speeches, 1950‐ 1987, “Statement by the Honourable Jean‐Luc Pépin, Minister of Mines and technical Surveys, Prepared for a panel discussion on ‘WATER RESOURCES – A COVETED ASSET, NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONAL’ at the Canadian Bar Association Convention, Winnipeg, Manitoba.” Box 3, #71‐28 – September 1, 1966, 7‐8. 16 Hon. John Turner, quoted by Herbert W. Herridge, “Great Lakes Water Levels.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 26th Parliament. 2nd Session. Vol. VIII (October 2, 1964). Queen’ Printer, 1964, 8682.

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formulating a truly national policy in May 1971, nothing that it “is not something to be conceived in an ivory tower but has to be developed, understood and managed as the result of the day‐to‐day experiences of Government, regions, industries, and people.”17 Perhaps this is why, in subsequent years, the complications of co‐ operative federalism and the restrictions of trade agreements such as NAFTA have shifted the emphasis away from “national” water policy towards Heinmiller’s more feasible concept of “policy emulation,” though it has bred uncertainty as to whether water is considered a tradable good in the agreement.18 Realizing the limitations of Canadians to agree to a truly national policy, water legislation may best be considered regionally based on the day‐to‐day experiences of government, industry, and citizens. Senator Frank Moss was correct in listing further research about Canadian water resources as a benefit of the NAWAPA plan, although he ultimately hoped that further study would reveal the unbelievably water‐rich nation he envisioned selling water to America. E. Roy Tinney and Frank Quinn argued at the 1969 Arid Lands in Perspective symposium that despite Canadian unwillingness at that time to consider large‐scale water withdrawals, Canadians as a whole were neither avoiding the issue, nor were they outright opposed to its consideration. For many Canadians, the problematic Columbia River Treaty saw advanced American knowledge of existing water resources trump the inexperience and lack of knowledge of the government with regards to Canadian water reserves, revealing the weakness of what the Science Council of Canada referred to as “technological sovereignty.”19 It highlighted the weakened bargaining position generated by Canadian resource ignorance: after

17 Library and Archives Canada, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources fonds, RG 21, Accession 1990‐91/030, FA 21‐15, Communications Branch ‐ Press Releases and Speeches, 1950‐ 1987, “Statement by the Honourable J.J. Greene to the Standing Committee on National Resources and Public Works” Box 6, #71‐28 – Ottawa, May 11, 1971, 2. 18 See David Johansen, Water Exports and the NAFTA. Library of Parliament. Queen’s Printer, March 8, 1999; also see Ontario Water Resources Association. June 12‐14, 1984. Future’s in Water: Proceedings of the Ontario Water Resources Association Conference. Toronto, Ontario; and the Canadian Water Resources Association. Windsor, J.E., ed. May 7‐8, 1992. Water Export – Should Canada’s Water Be For Sale? Vancouver, British Columbia for more information regarding water export and NAFTA. 19 Science Council of Canada. Annual Report 19771978. Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1978, 32.

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NAWAPA, the Canadian federal government saw fit to build upon its meager understanding of water resources by expanding and accelerating the existing inventory of national water supplies.20 Intervening in nature to secure a stable and sufficient supply of water has been a North American preoccupation for the last two centuries. The spirit of growth and development which opened (and closed) the American frontier has made a lasting impression on the pattern of human settlement in the arid Southwest to this day. What the future of water diversion in North America will look like is unclear: while some maintain that a continental water market is the easiest and most efficient way to facilitate trade and financial benefit from Canada’s water resources, others are pushing for a grassroots approach to water management at the community scale, respecting the right of water to exist as common property, if as property at all.21 Since the environmental impacts of development and growth are becoming increasingly clear, a change in government policy and social attitudes towards what is needed to live comfortably is as necessary as it is obvious to many. As American author and environmental essayist Edward Abbey noted, “there is no lack of water in the Mojave Desert unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”22 A solution is urgently needed for increasing water scarcity in many parts of North America, though the large‐scale resolution to this problem that NAWAPA and its proponents espoused has been roundly rejected since the 1960s. Ralph Pentland and Adèle Hurley argued in 2007 that “even though [the] prospect [of large‐scale diversions] does not appear to be on the immediate horizon, it is one that Canadians

20 E. Roy Tinney and Frank J. Quinn, quoted in American Association for the Advancement of Science. McGinnies, William G. and Bram J. Goldman, eds. Arid Lands in Perspective: Including AAS Papers on Water Importation Into Arid Lands. University of Arizona Press, 1969, 413. 21 See Terry L. Anderson, ed., Continental Water Marketing. 1994. Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy: San Francisco, California; and Maude Barlow, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 2007. 22 Edward Abbey, quoted in Robert Glennon, Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to do About it. Island Press, 2009, 1.

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may eventually have to face.” 23 It should be understood that theirs is more a cautionary note. Through a series of provincial and federal policies, the spectre of bulk water diversion from Canada to any nation seems unlikely. Though in an increasingly integrated and globalized world, as the effects of actual ecoscarcity grow more and more acute, Quinn notes that “before much longer, Canadians will have to decide…how much… we value our water, and, more than that, our sovereignty.”24 For now, NAWAPA remains a footnote to water diversion or export discussion in Canada, though its study, as I have demonstrated, has much to bring to the debate regarding the preservation of nature and freshwater in North America, and how those ends can best be served. It is a story that water engineers may use as an example of an idea taken too far, or a drafting project that neglected the environment it proposed to transform. For the sake of the environment and people of North America, this is how the Alliance – as a feasible solution to water shortages – should remain.

23 Ralph Pentland and Adele Hurley, ‘Thirsty Neighbours: A Century of Canada‐US Transboundary Water Governance’ in Bakker, Karen, ed. Eau Canada: The Future of Canada’s Water. UBC Press, 2007, 166. 24 Quinn, Water Diversion, Export and CanadaUS Relations (note 4), 14.

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Library and Archives Canada, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources fonds, RG 21, Accession 1990‐91/030, FA 21‐15, Communications Branch ‐ Press Releases and Speeches, 1950‐1987, “Statement by the Honourable J.J. Greene to the Standing Committee on National Resources and Public Works” Box 6, #71‐28 – May 11, 1971. Pp. 1‐30.

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United States Geological Survey. Hutson, Susan S., Nancy L. Barber, Joan F. Kenny, Kristin S. Linsey, Deborah S. Lumia, and Molly A. Maupin, eds. Circular 1268. Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000. 2004. U.S. Department of the Interior. Reston, Virginia.

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BOOKS AND BOOK CHAPTERS

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Hardin, Garret. ‘To Trouble a Star: The Cost of Intervention in Nature,’ in Roelofs, Robert, Joseph Crowley and Donald Hardesty, eds. Environment and Society: A Book of Readings on Environmental Policy, Attitudes, and Values. 1974. Prentice‐Hall Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

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Higgins, Laratt. ‘The Alienation of Canadian Resources: The Case of the Columbia River Treaty’ in Lumsden, Ian, ed. Close the 49th Parallel: The Americanization of Canada. 1970. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, Ontario. Pp. 223‐240.

Holm, Wendy, ed. Water and Free Trade: The Mulroney Government's Agenda for Canada's Most Precious Resource. 1988. J. Lorimer: Toronto, Ontario.

Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. 1987. Continuum. New York, New York.

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Katz, Cindi. ‘Whose Nature, Whose Culture? Private Productions of Space and the “Preservation” of Nature’ in Bruan, Bruce and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. 1998. Routledge: London, Englad. Pp. 46‐63.

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Kyba, Patrick. Alvin: A Biography of the Honourable Alvin Hamilton, P.C. 1989. Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina: Regina, Saskatchewan.

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Lasserre, Frederic. ‘Drawers of Water: Water Diversions in Canada and Beyond’ in Bakker, Karen, ed. Eau Canada: The Future of Canada’s Water. 2007. UBC Press: Vancouver, BC. Pp. 143‐162.

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Laxer, James. The Energy Poker Game: The Politics of the Continental Resource Deal. 1970. New Press. Toronto, Ontario.

Leiss, William. The Domination of Nature. 1972. George Braziller: New York, New York.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. 1969. Oxford University Press: London, England.

Limerick, Patricia N. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. 1987. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, New York.

Lloyd, Trevor. ‘A Water Resource Policy for Canada’ in Nelson, J.G. and M.J. Chambers, eds. Water: Process and Method in Canadian Geography. 1969. Methuen: Toronto, Ontario. Pp. 285‐293.

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Loo, Tina. States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. 2006. UBC Press. Vancouver, B.C.

Lowenthal, David. ‘The Place of the Past in the American Landscape’ in Lowenthal, David and Martyn Bowden, eds. Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honour of John K. Wright. 1976. Oxford University Press: New York, New York. Pp. 89‐ 117.

Massey, Vincent. On Being Canadian. 1948. J.M. Dent and Sons (Canada) Limited: Toronto, Ontario.

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Murphy, Earl Finbar. Governing Nature. 1967. Quadrangle Books. Chicago, Illinois.

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Swyngedouw, Erik. Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. 2004. Oxford University Press: New York, New York.

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Waterfield, Donald. Continental Waterboy: The Columbia River Controversy. 1970. Clarke, Irwin and Company Limited: Toronto, Ontario.

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Worster, Donald. ‘Two Faces West: The Development Myth in Canada and the United States’ in Hirt, Paul W., ed. Terra Pacifica: People and Place in the Northwest States and Western Canada. 1998. Washington State University Press: Pullman, Washington. Pp. 71‐90.

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Zimmermann, Erich W. World Resources and Industries: A Functional Appraisal of the Availability of Agricultural and Industrial Materials. Revised Edition. 1951. Harper & Brothers Publishers: New York, New York.

DIVERSION PROPOSALS AND REPORTS

Alberta. Department of Agriculture. December, 1968. Water Resources Division. Water Diversion proposals of North America. (Prepared for the Canadian Council of Resource Ministers). Edmonton, Alberta.

Parsons, Ralph M., Co. 1964. NAWAPA: North American Water and Power Alliance. Brochure No. 606‐2934‐19. Los Angeles.

MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS, AND WEBSITES

American Statesman. NAWAPA Promotion Stirs National Interest. Unknown.

American Statesman. Experts Eye Water in North. October 3, 1966.

Calgary Albertan. October 7, 1965.

Calgary Herald. October 4, 1965.

Christian Science Monitor. Conservationists Look Again at California’s Big Water Project. March 8, 1963.

Dam the Dams Campaign. The Water Plot. 1965. Dam the Dams Campaign: Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Pasadena Independent Star‐News. How to Make a Desert Bloom. September 13, 1964.

Edmonton Journal. Manitoba Has Hopes for its Cool, Clear Gold. April 23, 1968.

Newsweek. NAWAPA: Watering a Continent. February 22, 1965.

New York Times. Canada to Press Study of Water. October 23, 1966.

Oregon State University. Campana, Michael E. Canadian Water Exports: Will NAWAPA Return? January 25, 2008. Accessed August 5, 2009. < http://aquadoc.typepad.com/waterwired/2008/01/kennedy‐to‐cana.html>.

Ottawa Citizen. ‘Canada Comes First – Greene.’ January 16, 1970.

Power Engineering. Can We Use Water and Power from Alaska? It’s Costly, but Feasible. January, 1967.

Public Utilities Fortnightly. Importing Water from Canada. November 11, 1965.

San Jose State University Department of Economics. Watkins, Thayer. The North American Water and Power Alliance. Accessed August 5, 2009. - 140 -

Sun Belt Water Inc. Water – The World Looks to Canada. Accessed August 5, 2009. .

Toronto Daily Star. A Resource Pool with the U.S. Wouldn’t be a Sellout. December 11, 1969.

Toronto Globe and Mail. U.S. Proposal to Share Canada’s Water Evokes Anger, but Need May Bring it About. July 23, 1965.

Toronto Globe and Mail. Scheme to Divert Canadian Water Assailed. February 25, 1966.

Toronto Globe and Mail. Clean U.S. Water First Step – Udall. June 24, 1966.

Wall Street Journal. Policy Riddle: Ecology vs. the Economy. February 2, 1970.